Greg Sandoval at CNET News has
a great summary of the relative non-progress of newspapers in adopting weblogs effectively. While deals such as the recently
announced AP/Technorati alliance are making blogs more prominent in mainstream news outlets when they link to their content, for the most part news organizations are pretty timid in supporting true user-generated media under their editorial umbrellas. Greg catalogs many of the recent failures as well as the bright spot of
community-driven weblogs developed by the Austin Statesman-American, content that has its own featured spot on their online home page. But even here their weblog content is off to the side: it's not "editorial" content from a news organization's perspective. This gap is accentuated in Greg's piece by Patrick Williams, managing editor of the Dallas Observer, who wrestles with journalists who put out their leftovers in personal blogs and the wealth of self-proclaimed opinion-makers who fail to put out any new facts in their weblogs.
Yet behind these
stalking horse excuses lies the real truth: user-generated media confuses publishers. Oftentimes it's messy, illiterate, non-journalistic and crass - yet oftentimes it's true and compelling in ways that journalists never dare to be. Bloggers tend to stay on their soap boxes, which can be annoying if you don't like what they're saying but they tend to stick with issues and stories in ways that journalists chasing trendy stuff oftentimes fail to
emulate. The power of national and global advertising markets killed any sense of true objectivity in journalism: too many dollars chasing too few truths for too many people. The stakes have become too high, much as in Chris Anderson's "
Long Tail" the stakes for mass-market premium content have become so high that publishers take very few chances in creating content for the greatest number with the least common denominator.
But in the Long Tail the model for profits reverse: it's okay to make a little bit of money off of a ton of things that get monetized when people surface their value individually or collectively. So you do get a lot of junk in weblogs, but the junk trickles away from meaningful contexts while the true and truly entertaining content has a way of finding an audience all on its own. What is quality journalism in a weblog-driven world? The stuff that doesn't go away, the stuff that continues to get linked to by people in the know again and again. Weblogs are truth in motion, content that's willing to wait and to work to find an audience for its truth to develop or to have it flushed out in a flash as the occasion dictates. Traditional journalism is based on the concept that you have only one chance to print the truth correctly for mass-produced profits and immortality. Weblogs offer the truth the opportunity to bump around for a while, finding its own footing like a baby stumbling through its first stroll across a room with helping hands at the ready. This type of truth oftentimes fails to draw mass advertising for its real-time state, but that's okay: it will be real-time whenever its focused audience is ready for it.
Most newspapers will fail to embrace weblogs and other forms of user-generated media because of its inherent lack of appeal for mass advertisers - and in the process turn loose a world of news content to be contextualized elsewhere for very targeted online advertisers who are willing to wait for the content that its audience desires to come along. The truth may not make us rich in this model, but it will liberate the truth from mass market monologues and make it a part of focused conversations that will yield a greater value to society as a whole. The sooner that news organizations work to contextualize a truth whose time has come regardless of its source the sooner that they will be on the road to a hybridized model that will sustain their long-term financial health. I'm not optimistic for this happening any time soon, but you never know.
