Fascinating that Andrew Malcolm, 64-year-old political writer for the LAT gets blogs when so many of his newspaper-raised peers do not.
I’ve got three grown children, and one is a teenager still, and none of them read newspapers — but all of them were raised and fed and clothed based on income from newspapers. That was clear evidence to me that there was some necessary change.
One of the reasons I got into journalism was that I loved the tough stories. And in journalism, I thought I could learn something new every day. American newspapers have routine-ized everything, and you start doing things because you do them that way. And you don’t even start thinking, “Is there one person who wants to read this?” This becomes your job and you’re missing the customer aspect of it. Looking back on it, newspapers became like a pharmacy, people came and got their printed medicine and took it away. But over time there were other counters opening up and people didn’t want to take your medicine. To me, that’s exciting, but to a lot of my colleagues it’s very terrifying because you have to learn a lot of new things.
Uh-uh. Malcolm also adds that the “beachcomber” aspect of reading and writing online is very alluring. And it is — for those of us who share a certain way of thinking. Some people have hyperlinked brains, ones that make connections between seemingly unrelated things, other minds are more linear. Any organization needs both types, but bloggers tend to be the link brains.
Put another way, I wouldn’t want to be stuck in an outfit with a bunch of people who think like me. We’d all flit from thing-to-thing and nothing produced would be over 2000 words. Over the years newspapers have excelled in producing a uniform workforce that can hit deadlines with quotes from two sources in packages either 600 or 1200 words long. But blogs do not have deadlines. The deadline does not matter, the connections do.
Malcolm gets that the immediate and direct connection with readers is an important part of blogs. He gets the that the feedback is two-way, that it is a conversation not a sermon. This also makes blogs opposite of predictable newspapers:
You’ve got the most important story in the upper right, and you’ll have a picture here above the fold and it’s less important as you go down the page. [The newspaper] is directly contradictory of what the new experience is where I’m in control and I’ll go where I want. There are no lane markers, you can jump to wherever you want and do what you want.
Exactly. Further, as we noted here, I even control what ads, if any, the content-producer shows me. He or she better let me opt in and let me choose, or I will shut them all out. Accordingly, traffic counts are Web phrenology. Anyone paying for gross page views is a sucker.
Malcolm does still cling to the antedulivian notion that a journalist must always strive to obscure their own political views from readers. This is a remnant of the God’s eye view that infests too many editorial offices — that “real” journalists are above having thoughts, feelings, and inclinations on the great questions of the day. That their views are merely the unbiased conclusions that “everyone” knows.
Malcolm seems smart enough to reject this fiction and I suspect he will sooner or later. If nothing else the shield of supposed objectivity stunts an open, reciprocal relationship with readers. Having a point of view does not scare off readers — being a troll does.
