The Modern Journalist

Blogs and Link Journalism

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Buster Olney and Jayson Stark are my favorite writers at ESPN.com. Mostly because they cover baseball and I can’t live without baseball (including MLB.tv, which for $10 per month lets me watch and listen to every baseball game each month through my computer, which is hooked up to my TV).

That I love two hardcore baseball writers isn’t particularly interesting to anyone but me. But there are two aspects of this that media folks might find interesting:

1. I pay to read their blogs because ESPN put them behind a content wall called Insider
2. I pay because they each have blog posts that contain nothing but links — with a brief analysis — about what is happening on each major league team

In other words, I get their news stories for free but I pay to read their blogs because I find a much greater depth of knowledge about a subject I like on the blogs. They are must reads for anybody who cares about baseball.

It’s called link journalism and it’s a great way to use blogs.

When I was at Technology Review we had a series of discussions about how to monetize content online. My philosophy is simple: we give away what people expect to see at a news organization. Stories, pictures and video were fair game. We needed to develop business plans around that content. However, anything else would should be sold as a premium service.

We had one product, Insider, which was a monthly newsletter that gave great depth and detail about what was happening in the labs at MIT. For people who wanted to keep up with innovation, this was a valuable resource.

We also charged for it. I was always in favor — and was voted down — on expanding this offering to include a premium website that offered updated content from other labs around the country. We could have drastically increased our offering — which was a huge cash cow in terms of ROI — without expending too much effort. The best part: it also fit directly into our mission, and if it was done right, could have been re-purposed in some format on the free website and in the magazine.

I would venture to say that Stark and Olney have found stories — particularly systemic stories — by creating blog posts that track what every team in the major leagues is doing each week. I’ll bet I’ve read stories on ESPN’s free site that came from that work.

If you don’t buy the idea that people are willing to pay for blogs, that an understandable position. By and large, people haven’t. And I don’t think that it’s a solution that works for every blog.

We are seeing a large upswing, though, in the number of people who are reading blogs for their news value. In 2007, 94 million people reading blogs, roughly 50 percent of the U.S. population that is online. That population is expected to reach 67 percent by 2012.

Done properly, news organizations have the opportunity to create a network of blogs that can be monetized across several platforms.

To make this work, companies will need to radically overhaul their internal operations to make it easier to share information between properties. England’s Guardian News & Media company is doing just that.

The single news, business and sport teams will contribute news to all three platforms and will answer to “platform-neutral” heads of national news, international news, business and sport – roles that are all being advertised internally.

The three platforms: print, Web and mobile.

It’s not hard to see how easily content could be monetized and shared between the operations if you have groups reporting directly to agnostic editors, who oversee various products.