Newspapers Just Don’t Do Blogs Well
April 3rd, 2008 | by Brad King |The fine folks at Ball State University, who frankly do some of the best research in new media (I did a fellowship there last year), came out with a study that found newspaper blogs are — by and large — a waste.
The reason: inconsistent posts and a lack of attention to the comment section.
Well, those are two of the reasons listed, but certainly not the entirety of the problem.
The study followed 360 newspapers in the five days leading up to an election. They found 42 percent of the papers had blogs, but there was a wide disparity when it comes to how the individual papers used the blogs.
Which could explain why many of them were deemed failures. But the problem with newspaper blogs goes deeper than just a numbers game.
During my annual review yesterday, I was discussing the issue I hade with other departments teaching students how to use technology. The journalism department at Northern Kentucky University wants to add "technology" into the curriculum.
I don’t yet know what that means, but I have two suspicions: either they want to teach students how to use software tools (which is what we do in Media Informatics) or they are under the assumption that the learning curve for technology is quite small.
My argument (as straw man as it is) against the first is that until you understand how the underlying technology works (code, for example), you don’t really know how to use Dreamweaver. Because at some point, something will break and you need to understand how to fix it. You can’t do that without a foundation in code.
In other words, if you just GRAB the technology and use it, without understanding it, you are bound to fail.
And my argument against the second (as straw man as it is) is that if the learning curve is so small, then why have degrees in Computer Science and Media Informatics? We should just have a course here or there.
Which brings us back to blogs.
Of course the newspaper blogs failed. They are set up to fail. They are put together by people who don’t truly understand the underlying forces that drive that technology.
This is problematical. Not for technologist. But for newspapers.
