Journalists should blog?

In our recent, Blog Relations Podcast (Hacks and Bloggers), Graham Holliday, aka Pieman, had some stimulating ideas about how newspapers can respond to blogs and the drift of readers to the internet. He’s also been outlining some of them on his blog at Noodlepie.

I agree with Graham that newspapers can harness the power of blogs, so that journalists can publish interview notes, MP3s, photographs, etc, and receive feedback - but I also think that it’s a big undertaking.

So yes, journalists should blog. But there are other ways that newspapers can try to arrest their the decline in readership. They should begin by asking why it is that they aren’t so popular anymore .

Travel is a great example. Yes, the internet is sucking away readers. But it’s probably more to do with the quality of the writing, and the soft relationship between travel editors and travel companies as discussed here recently.

American newspapers are pompous and take themselves far too seriously. They’ve lost all trace of the lively style that characterised their heyday in the 1920s and 1930s.

British papers regard their readers and freelancers as lunatics instead of a valuable source of feedback. They are also far too narrowly focused on domestic issues, and “abroad” doesn’t exist, unless there is a Brit there.

In general, the newspaper industry is short on creative thinking, largely because it’s populated by people who are confident that “they know what’s best.”

I’m not a huge fan of Britain’s Independent Newspaper, mainly for political reasons, but it is an example of a newspaper that has been trying to respond to these issues. Early on it declared that it would not accept travel freebies (I don’t know whether its stuck to that). It’s innovated with its front page, running highly opinionated stories - the sort that you often read on blogs. There is a seam of creativity running through it.

By all means adopt new technology. But also innovate with the old technology. Screen or paper, it doesn’t really matter. Be Creative. And stop regarding bloggers as freaks. Try and emulate some of their online success in print.

This entry was posted on January 16th, 2006 and is filed under Blog Home, Media, blogosphere. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.