Thad McIlroy - The Future of Publishing

1. Old Media Adds a Bit of the New
Newspapers are catching onto the power and compelling nature of blogs. eMarketer reports that "of the many interactive features of the top 100 newspaper and magazine Web sites in the US, reporter blogs rank near the top, as do comments on blogs, according to a study by The Bivings Group. A full 95% of the top 100 US newspapers now offer reporter blogs (up from 80% in 2006), while 58% of the top 100 magazines provide this service."

2. Businesses Embrace Blogging
At the same time that the news media is catching on to blogging in a big way, U.S. corporations are catching onto it in a smaller, though increasing way. BtoB Magazine noted in June 2008 that "only about 12% of Fortune 500 corporations run a corporate blog. Yet companies that have made a commitment -- including Dell, Eastman Kodak Co., IBM Corp., Intel Corp. and SAP -- are now deep into blogging programs with multiple weblogs, dozens of bloggers and a wealth of expertise and best practices to share."

3. The State of the Live Web, April 2007
David Sifry, founder and chairman of Technorati, has been issuing annual reports on blogging (and associated technologies - which he refers to as "the live Web) since October, 2004. Sadly, his last report is from April 2007, but there are lots of statistics and background information. Perhaps the reason he's discontinued the annual update is best explained in Anne Helmond's blog from February 2008, "How Many Blogs Are There? Is Someone Still Counting?" Quoting from a Wall Street Journal article from 2005, she emphasizes, "First, let's step back and consider why we're counting blogs at all. You no longer see articles that attempt to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Web by stating how many Web pages there are."

4. The Universal Diarist
Well, Mena & Ben Trott are now the queen and king of blogging software, according to The Economist (November 23, 2006) (subscription required). They now refer to "intimate media" rather than "mass media." Their company is called Six Apart (http://www.sixapart.com), but they are more noted for their ownership of Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal, and their newest blog-type offering, Vox (http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/17825). According to the article, "She and her husband...sincerely regard blogging as a way of life."

Their businesses and their experience illustrate the close overlap between "social networking" and blogging.

5. Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers
(http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP Bloggers Report July 19 2006.pdf) 7/19/2006, by Amanda Lenhart, Susannah Fox at the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The "Pew Internet & American Life Project" (http://www.pewinternet.org/) is a great resource for anyone interested in the future of publishing. It is packed full of data, reports and commentary on all aspects of the Internet and the Web. Not only is the information free of charge, but it appears to be largely without bias, having been funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts ("The Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent non-profit, is the sole beneficiary of seven charitable funds established by two sons and two daughters of Sun Oil Company founder Joseph N. Pew and his wife, Mary Anderson Pew, between 1948 and 1979."). Your gas dollars at work!

"Bloggers: A Portrait of the Internet's New Storytellers," is described on the Pew site as follows: "The ease and appeal of blogging is inspiring a new group of writers and creators to share their voices with the world.

"A national phone survey of bloggers finds that most are focused on describing their personal experiences to a relatively small audience of readers and that only a small proportion focus their coverage on politics, media, government, or technology. Blogs, the survey finds, are as individual as the people who keep them. However, most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression - documenting individual experiences, sharing practical knowledge, or just keeping in touch with friends and family."

6. Meanwhile in Beware of Blog: A Rush to Judgment (ZDNet, April 17th, 2007) Ed Burnette recounts several recent tales of bloggers getting news and facts completely wrong. This is often compounded as one blogger quotes another, and the story moves down the blogging trail. As with conversational gossip, the inaccuracies tend to get magnified as the story is retold.

Stories like these arise frequently these days: probably not surprising with some 80 million or so blogs out there. As I have pointed out elsewhere on this site (and as have many, many others), printed journalism is also far from free from error.

While at first glance this all sounds terrible and tragic, I think the weeping and wailing is overdone. Another great Pew Center report, News Audiences Increasingly Politicized, published in June, 2004, features an in-depth analysis on the decline in media credibility. The analysis provides extensive detail on both broadcast and print media. "...Two news organization share the top spot in terms of print news credibility," according to the report. "The weekly news magazine U.S. News & World Report and the Wall Street Journal are viewed as highly credible by 24% of those who are able to rate them.

"In previous polls, the Wall Street Journal stood well above the rest of the pack, but that is no longer the case. Ratings for the Journal have plummeted in recent years. In 1998 and 2000, 41% of those able to rate it said they could believe all or most of what they read in the Wall Street Journal. That number...now stands at 24%.

"...Ratings for local daily newspapers have fallen more sharply. In 1998, roughly three-in-ten (29%) of those able to rate their local newspaper said they could believe all or most of what it said. That has declined to 19% in the current survey."

7. Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists
By Nicholas Lehmann, The New Yorker, August 7, 2006

Leave it to The New Yorker to bring a serious analysis to the question of whether blogging a form of journalism. Lehmann is a skeptic: "To live up to its billing, Internet journalism has to meet high standards both conceptually and practically: the medium has to be revolutionary, and the journalism has to be good," he writes. "The quality of Internet journalism is bound to improve over time, especially if more of the virtues of traditional journalism migrate to the Internet. But, although the medium has great capabilities, especially the way it opens out and speeds up the discourse, it is not quite as different from what has gone before as its advocates are saying."

After an historical analysis of reporting in England and the U.S. he moves to the conclusion: "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away."

A very good book for background on this issue is "A History of News" by Mitchell Stephens, published originally by Viking Penguin in 1988, and republished in a 3^rd edition by Oxford University Press in 2006.