Why we don’t want to commit to a subscription
A while ago the Nieman Journalism Lab published an article about how the act of subscribing to a news outlet, be it a magazine or newspaper, feels limiting. By paying for The Economist, I’m limiting myself to that one news magazine. I’m not going to subscribe to Maclean’s in addition.
The only magazines people will subscribe to?
Gina Chen, the author of the article in question, suggests that the web has created a kind of commitment phobia with regard to subscriptions; she writes,
Things changed with the web. Now, if I choose one magazine to subscribe to out of myriad sources, it feels like I’m limiting my options in a way. I don’t want to commit to one publication, one source, one newspaper, one magazine
Don’t follow the hype
This desire to avoid commitment is changing the way we approach news and media far more than other, more hyped inventions. People said the iPad tablet would save newspapers and traditional media (well, not everyone). People argue that social networks completely revamp how we find and read news stories (I don’t disagree, as you can see here). But the relationship between us and news matters more than any device or network. Take this post (again from the Nieman Lab) about how online news is to print journalism as ramen noodles are to steak.
The creation of personalized news hubs (think Pandora but for news instead of music) is one reaction to subscription phobia. As you can see in this article about the many different sites devoted to personalized content, it’s already a popular phenomenon. These hubs want to be the one link you click on when you’re looking for news. The one I’m feeling out, iCurrent, allows you to vote individual stories up or down and choose which categories of news you want to hear (some examples being american politics or golf). iCurrent then learns from your choices and provides you with the news it thinks you want.
Not quite there yet
It’s not perfect, though. iCurrent picks articles up via keywords and not always by subject, so stories are misfiled occasionally. But it’s just in beta, and the simple existence of so many personalized news sites is what matters. If newspapers and magazines want to keep up with the modern consumer, they need to focus less on selling advertising and more on making sure that they understand how we want to relate to them.
I’m fine, for example, with subscribing to a print edition of The Economist. But I don’t know if I would want to pay for a purely online version. For one, I like having the printed copy. But more importantly, when I’m online, I often don’t want to stick to one source.
What will the future look like?
Maybe in the next 10 years, newspapers will be replaced by an organization of freelance journalists and blogs, who are paid by how many hits their stories get on personalized news sites like iCurrent and the many others sure to pop up in the coming years. Maybe they’ll all agree to put up paywalls so we’ll have to subscribe to at least one to get any news just like before the advent of the internet. So newspapers and magazines, if you’re reading, do some research. Ask readers not where they find their news or what they subscribe to, but how they feel about subscribing and how they relate to news providers.
Are readers allies or simply a hindrance to online content publishers?
Nowadays, a multitude of content delivery methods exist for the internet-savvy. Do you use RSS (really simple syndication) and have everything delivered to you in your reader of choice? (Mine is Google Reader.) Or have you chosen the low-tech approach, simply visiting blogs you read every once in a while to check for updates? If, like me, you use a reader, you’ve noticed that some writers and websites only allow an excerpt of the article to be published in a reader, forcing interested parties to click through to the website.
The icon of the future
Why excerpt?
Clickthroughs are valuable because it means that readers are going to see the ads on the website instead of just reading the content. (Ads do not appear in readers.) This means that those who only provide excerpts to readers are usually writing for a larger entity, such as a magazine or newspaper rather than a personal blog. But excerpting has its downsides.
Once a reader has gotten used to the comfort of following all their blogs and magazines through a reader, it’s jarring to see only a few sentences of an article. When I am reading through the various articles that have appeared in my reader overnight or after a day away from the computer, I am most likely to skip over the excerpted ones. This might seem lazy. Why not just make the extra click, it won’t take a lot of effort.
It’s not just an issue of sloth
When I come across an excerpted article, my first thought is always about why it’s not published in full in my reader. The publisher wants me to make them look better by coming to their website. (Website hits are counted separately from RSS subscribers.) However, I want to follow writers and publications who value my readership and want to spread their words rather than clipping them off. When I am reminded of how a publisher sees me, I cannot help but feel slighted.
If excerpting is something that largely irritates readers (something I believe publications should attempt to avoid rather than espouse), how can these websites generate clickthroughs?
Use finesse, not force
Excerpting forces interested readers to jump through hoops for your content. Why make it so difficult and bothersome? Publications should be interested in more than just hits. They should want fans and readers. That’s how you’ll get people to tweet about you and share your articles. A better, and more reliable, way to draw readers is to take advantages of what readers cannot do. Charts, interesting formatting, interactive elements and other such things do not appear (and even if they do, they’re often formatted oddly or just broken) in readers.
A great example is a recent article by Tim Harford that included, of all things, an interactive Monopoly game that tied into the story itself. When I realize something like that is on the website, I’m not irritated about clicking through, I’m excited. So where you can, create incentives for your readers to visit your website rather than forcing them to click through.
Links and how you should be using them
Links seem pretty simple. You know exactly what they do already — you click on one and it brings up a new page. But there’s more to it than that. When you decide you want to link to something in a blog post or article, here are a few things to consider:
- What text do you link
- What do you link to (the main page of your target or something more specific)
- How do you contextualize your link (if at all)
- When not to link
Which is the weakest link?
#1: What text to link
The easiest way to delve into this subject is with a sample sentence, so here’s what I’ll work with:
There’s a really great magazine that does especially excellent articles about search engine optimization.
This sentence has a few things that could use a link: “magazine,” “articles” and “search engine optimization” (depending on whether you can expect your readership to already understand what search engine optimization is). The adjectives in this sample sentence are generic, so avoid converting them into link text. So with links, the sentence would look like this (note: not real links):
There’s a really great magazine that does especially excellent articles about search engine optimization.
But what if you had more descriptive descriptors, as in “16th century coins” versus “really great coins.” This is fully a judgment call, but I think it’s important to making your links as clear as possible.
#2: Where to target your links
Be specific. If you’re linking a certain article, link that article. If you’re linking to an image, get the exact page of the image and not just the website where the image sits. If one of your readers clicks on a link, they should know exactly what they’re getting into and not be surprised at all.
But there’s also value in providing a link, for example, to a magazine’s homepage as well as to the specific article you’re referring to. And this leads into my next point…
#3: How do you contextualize your links
Going off of the example I just used, here’s what a line might look like that links both a home page and a specific page.
The Economist put up a really great article about pandas.
Links often take the place of parenthetical statements in print writing. So where in print I might write: “The Economist, a news and finance magazine,” online I can simply link to it. It’s the same reason I converted “search engine optimization” into a link earlier in this post rather than writing a quick description in brackets. Linking well allows articles to cover more ground. If you’re writing an article for print, you’re on your own. On a blog or online magazine, take advantage of the resources available to you and link.
#4: When not to link
Sentences shouldn’t end up with more link than regular text. You risk a) overloading your reader with information and b) distracting readers from your original content, which is the most important part of your site. An example of a badly over-linked sentence:
Maclean’s Magazine has a Twitter feed which they use to publish Canadian news and stories.
Too many links!
Some extra tips for linking
- Link only the words you want to link (i.e. don’t link spaces around a word, like this: word )
- Don’t link the homepages of websites like Twitter or Facebook when you’re talking about a specific feed or page (see my example of bad linking)
- Don’t link to explicit material, sites that spoil events in television shows/movies that haven’t aired yet, or anything else your reader might be upset about without adding a label, as in: Here’s a link to a cool website (NSFW).
5 reasons why e-readers shouldn’t be compared to books
A while ago, I read this article on whether or not e-readers would help spread knowledge or wall it off. At the time, I agreed with the comparison Shardanand (the author) makes between e-readers and books: that e-readers are currently not as effective or useful as books are. Recently, I’ve been reconsidering the comparison, and here’s a 5 reasons why:
1. An e-reader is more than just a book; it’s a tool. While you might not be able to fold the pages down or make notes in the margin, e-readers have other points in their favour. The most important (and useful) in my mind, is that it’s a lot easier to carry an e-reader than a library of books 100,000 large.
2. E-readers aren’t a revolution. It’s a niche thing (right now); people who can afford $300 on top of the price of the books they want to read, people who travel a lot — these are the people who might buy an e-reader. As a student and someone who might not even read $300 dollars of books in a year, I’m unlikely to buy one.
3. The simple existence of e-readers won’t wall of knowledge to the elite who can afford them. The introduction of e-readers into the book-buying market won’t stop the book publishing industry from printing books. In fact, since Amazon has recently allowed authors to self-publish their works in Kindle format, the barrier to entry for publishing a book is lower.
4. Shardanand points out that it’s hard to share books on an e-reader (short of lending the reader itself). But the problem with this statement is that e-readers have not taken over book publishing by storm yet. They’re a small share of the market, and I still think that the technology is very much in beta. As with television, the way we use e-readers will most certainly change over time. Consider the prevalence of DVR — not many people I know watch TV shows when they air live anymore.
5. A book is a book is a book. One book printed today isn’t a whole lot different from what was printed by the first Gutenberg press (the processes aside). But the development of e-readers is going to be much more strongly affected by competition. There’s already talk of an Apple reader in addition to Barnes & Noble’s and Amazon’s, among a host of others.
E-readers are in beta testing. It’s just a widely publicized, very scrutinized beta test.
Or how I stopped worrying and learned to love my language, with all its faults
English, as a language, is evolving. You know this already just from everyday conversation. 200 years ago, there was no “internet” and so the word itself never existed. When the internet came about, we coined a word. As a book I just read (Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: the Untold History of English, by John McWhorter) argues, English grammar has also changed a lot over the years. So if it’s happened before, why are we so afraid (and resistant) of it happening again?
The Vikings are coming!
McWhorter cites the Viking invasion of England in the late 1st century A.D. He notes that the Vikings, especially the adults, learned English as it suited them, i.e. only as much as they needed to communicate. As a result, English took a beating and the grammar changed forever. Reflecting on this situation, I don’t feel pity or sympathy for the language “losing” parts of its grammar. I prefer to think of it as evolving.
So why is it that many people, in response to English grammar and spellings changing today, feel revulsion or fear? Language is and always has been about communicating, not necessarily communicating in a polished way that simply adds difficulty.
The internet (among other things) strikes again
I think part of the reason for the worry is how often we see people writing things down in ways deemed “wrong.” In the past, as McWhorter makes clear, there was always a large disconnect between the way people spoke and the way people wrote. Nowadays, with a significantly larger amount of casual writing, such as texting, e-mailing and IMing, people feel much stronger about how English is evolving.
Here are two examples of interesting things in English, one that people barely think of as strange (if they think of it at all) and one that many find absolutely wrong.
1. Saying “John and me went to the store” rather than “John and I…” It’s completely, grammatically, wrong. No editor worth his or her salt would let you print that without special consideration (such as having a narrator who doesn’t know English very well). Regardless of it’s correctness, many (I’m guilty of this too) use “John and me” in speech, even if the speaker is aware that it is incorrect.
2. Did you know that you pronounce “have” in two ways? It’s the same word with the same spelling, but in two different contexts it’s very likely that you use two pronunciations. Say these sentences:
- I have to go
- I have a cat
Did the two haves sound different? The first one sounds more like “haf” than “have.” If I started writing “I haf to go” instead of “I have to go,” I don’t think people would be appreciative of my simplifying the language. I would get pelted with rotten fruit and vegetables everywhere I went. But if I continue to say “haf” instead of “have” and never write it, nobody will notice or mention the difference. (I only realized it after reading Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought over the summer.)
English is more like the tortoise than the hare
For the sake of this analogy, imagine that the race of The Tortoise and the Hare has no finish line. English doesn’t stop and take a nap for a little while, as the strict grammar police want it to. (Look, I ended a sentence with a preposition! Don’t tell the grammar police.) It’s more like the tortoise: always (if slowly) walking forward. There’s no reason to believe that the tortoise will spontaneously combust or step on a land mine and become unusable. We’ll never miraculously stop understanding it as long as it’s a spoken language.
So why worry?
I have a Twitter account and I’m only mildly ashamed of it (you can see the link to the right of the most recent post’s header). I don’t post very many things, the exceptions being notifications of new posts here and interesting news articles or other websites. I also communicate with people I know as well as writers and websites that have Twitter accounts.
The inspiration for twitter?
My favourite example of using Twitter in this way (and you’ll hear me say this to anyone who derides Twitter) is that I tweeted a few comments at my personal hero Tim Harford and actually got responses (twice!). If you sent an e-mail or, god forbid, a snail mail letter, to a writer or TV personality or critic, would you expect a response? I wouldn’t. But somehow Twitter is different. Tweeters spend as much time responding to other tweets (from fans or colleagues) as they do simply tweeting their own stuff. In fact, if you follow any kind of writer or news organization on Twitter, you’re much more likely to encounter useful, interesting information than what people usually think of as typical Tweets.
Now I’ll show you two Twitter feeds that exemplify different sides of why Twitter can be great.
First up is the Nieman Journalism Lab.
As an organization that discusses how newspapers are surviving the 21st century, it’s only fitting that they’ve embraced Twitter and done so successfully. So what can you expect from following the Nieman Lab on Twitter?
- Interesting news articles (from outside sources) related to the subject material of the blog
This is doubly beneficial for readers: not only do you get links to material that’s been vetted by writers you (as a reader of the blog) already respect, but you also potentially find new Twitter feeds to follow. My relationship with Twitter is a lot like how I use Google Reader: to gain information. When I find a blog or website that I enjoy, I often follow it both in my reader and on Twitter.
- Notification of new posts on the website
For those who don’t use a reader, Twitter provides an alternative. Writers tweet new posts on their websites, notifying followers. (Nice additionally because readers often have a delay between when the article is originally posted and when it appears through the RSS feed.)
So this is one kind of Twitter: updates about the website and the people running the Twitter feed, related links and possible other perks (job postings, contests, etc.)
Next is Alan Sepinwall’s Twitter.
He’s a TV critic who likes a lot of the same TV that I do. So very often the things he says on Twitter interest me. He’s also pretty well known in TV critic circles, which means famous people (TV producers, writers, and creators, etc.) are more likely to respond to him than to me. This ties in to my first point.
A few days ago, Sepinwall and a few other TV critics on Twitter (Twitics, according to Sepinwall) had a discussion about the show Big Love. By discussion, I mean a bunch of critics tweeting at each other, having a kind of public, realtime-observable conversation. Even if you aren’t as interested in TV or TV critics as I am, isn’t this really cool, just as a phenomenon? It wasn’t pre-planned (as far as I know) and is different from one blogger writing a post and having others comment. If I was pretentious I might call it organic. So that’s one benefit of following someone like Sepinwall on Twitter: reading a discussion that really couldn’t happen anywhere else (certainly not in a newspaper).
Another perk: Just as a blog allows a newspaper reporter to be more candid and unrestricted than print journalism, Twitter allows for casual tweeting, which can be humorous or informational.
Sepinwall often answers reader questions; for example (from his Twitter feed):
Pilot + 2 more. I like it. RT @zacharydaniel: have you seen any episodes beyond pilot of Caprica?
He’s also not averse to silliness, as seen here:
I’m so cold that I’m wearing a Snuggie someone got us for the holidays. I’ve never been so filled with self-loathing.
Followed by:
I wish. I’m just not sure it’s possible to wear a Snuggie ironically. A Snuggie just IS. RT @sassone Are you wearing it ironically?
Not all Twitter feeds are created equal
Even though the title of this post (and much of the content) argues that Twitter is not just a place for 140-character Facebook status updates, some people use it for just that. Look here if you want to see that kind of Twitter (sorry Ms. Meester, I enjoy your acting more than your tweeting). If you want to be infuriated by obnoxious tweeting, look no further than John Mayer’s Twitter.
But don’t judge all of Twitter based on the fact that many use it as a way to tell followers about how rainy it is outside or how you are sad because you lost your teddy bear. Judge it based on those who use it effectively and strive to provide their followers with real updates that will be enjoyed and appreciated. I’ve heard a lot of bad things about Twitter as a medium (it’s all drivel, meaningless status updates, etc.) but rarely criticisms of specific Twitter feeds, which is how the service should be measured. Just as you wouldn’t go about criticizing WordPress (the service that hosts this blog) if you hated my blog, don’t criticize Twitter as a whole for the failings of individuals.
This is a discussion I have had, often regarding writers who are very good at either telling stories or writing well. Some examples: J.K. Rowling is a good storyteller, but not a fantastic writer. Michael Ondaatje is an excellent writer but not a very good storyteller. Storytelling and writing are separate skillsets, and I don’t believe an author requires both characteristics to be considered a good writer.
So what makes J.K. Rowling a good storyteller?
Seven books that don't take long to get through
Have you ever read any of the Harry Potter books (I’ve read all seven)? Did you manage to finish each book in the series in about three days despite the 600-700 page length (or “extent” if you want to use cool publishing industry terms)? I know I did. Storytelling is just that: Rowling gets her readers very involved in the events of each Harry Potter novel and doesn’t drag individual episodes on too long. The seventh book is a bit of an exception to this rule — it just took too long for the action to pick up and was anticlimactic.
But on the way to the end, if you’re like me, you probably stumbled on a few (or more) sentences. You probably thought “Huh?” and had to reread the sentence to get the full meaning. That’s part of writing. So if I ever tell you that I love Harry Potter but think that J.K. Rowling is not the greatest writer, you’ll know what I mean (and hopefully won’t be too insulted).
Why is Michael Ondaatje not a great storyteller?
The book I’m mainly talking about here is In the Skin of a Lion, a book about lots of things I barely remember from reading it. The one thing I do remember about the book is that each sentence was a pleasure to read. One of my instructors at school is fond of saying that readers don’t often notice when punctuation is used properly, but that it makes for a pleasurable and easy reading experience.
Unlike with Harry Potter books, I find that I don’t stumble or reread phrases in Michael Ondaatje’s work (unless I forgot what was going on in the story and had to go back a paragraph or two). The difference between Ondaatje and Rowling is a little bit like that between copyediting (fixing grammar and awkward phrasing) and substantive editing (improving the story and plot on a larger scale).
So now you know.
For a while now, Microsoft has been trying to set up its own search engine (I had to Google it to find the address) to rival the almighty Google. One would think that, as with most competition between companies, new entries would attempt to develop a new business model or offer better services for cheaper. But Google’s search is free and it works really well (in addition to the fact that I use Google for just about everything else — e-mail, calendar, maps, the google reader). So what does Microsoft decide to do? It’s offering to pay news providers to pull content away from Google so that you can exclusively find it on Bing.
Which way to the search results?
This information makes me shy away from Bing. I realize that this might be kind of an old fashioned or naive reaction, but I think the battle to have the best search engine should be about searching. When deciding between Bing and Google, the only question I want to ask is “Which will help me find what I want in the best, easiest, cheapest way?” This dilemma made me think of something James Harbeck feels strongly about: that changes in language (such as adapting new words, phrases and idioms) are not signs of the coming apocalypse or the destruction of life as we know it, but steps towards making communication more effective.
Bing’s attempt to subvert Google in this way is the opposite kind of development. Having two search engines, each competing to acquire exclusive content, makes the internet more like a series of toll roads with little traffic on them than an information superhighway.
Wrote this as an assignment for class, figured I’d post it here as well.
The Ocean
How newspapers are faring in the wake of the internet and how they might put some wind back in their sails
36 years ago, in the song “The Ocean” Led Zeppelin compared their audience at concerts to an ocean. Jonathan Harris, the vice president of digital media at The National Post, makes a similar comparison with internet traffic: “It’s hard to dam an ocean; all you can do is divert water.”
But that’s exactly what The Post is trying to do with its online content: get people to visit their website. The Post’s earlier strategy was to put up a pay wall, blocking access to its website for non-paying customers. But things didn’t go as planned; “Traffic tanked as soon as we put the pay wall up,” Mr. Harris said.
If newspapers like The Post can’t simply charge for its content online as it does for the print copy, how can they make money? This question, and the search for an answer, has defined the newspaper industry ever since people began to read news online instead of paying for a print subscription.
But it’s not as serious a shake-up to the business model as everyone thinks. Mr. Harris explains:
In an online model, we’re giving away stories for free, but in the old model we’re paying you to read the newspaper. It costs money to distribute the newspaper to people’s homes. Today’s model [the content is] free; in the old newspaper model it costs [the newspaper] to deliver the newspaper to you. This new model is more efficient.
Although this new model is “more efficient,” it doesn’t seem to be working. According to “court documents… The National Post had an EBITA[earnings before the deduction of interest, tax and amortization expenses] loss of $20.3 million, $16.3 million, $13.1 million and $12.7 million, respectively” from 2005-08.”
Mr. Harris suggests that newspapers might keep themselves afloat for longer by “increasing the price of the newspaper and lowering the amount of papers delivered.” This makes sense. By far the largest expense for newspaper publishers is in the printing (“It’s a killer,” says Mr. Harris). Unfortunately, a large part of The National Post’s woes are entrenched in the newspaper business. “News and opinion [are] harder to monetize” because they are commodities, Mr. Harris says. Through the proliferation of blogs and free access to information on the internet, newspapers have lost their competitive edge, and, slowly, their subscribers and advertisers.
People are only willing to pay for very specific kinds of news and information — not the kind of broad coverage that a newspaper provides. Mr. Harris provides a few examples of the kinds of digitial services and information people will pay for: “Music (iTunes), certain services (Amazon), niche content that serves business interests (legal sites where you can search specific cases), stock information.” More specialized sources of information, such as blogs and trade magazines can better serve these markets than newspapers, which typically cover anything from politics to television and film.
If the internet didn’t force a change onto newspapers, perhaps the newspaper industry would be better off now if it had. The music industry has had its fare share of trouble with piracy, but is now resurfacing and innovating with services such as the iTunes Music Store. If newspapers had faced the abrupt challenge that the illegal downloading of music presented rather than a slow decline in subscribers and ad revenue (compounded by the recession), they might be more resilient than they are now.
“All publishers are looking for new models,” Mr. Harris says. “You can’t force people to buy something. You have to recognize what the market wants.” And the market doesn’t appear to want to pay to receive news online. Conversely, people don’t want to live in a world without newspapers. More than providing news, newspapers excel at “shining a light in the dark places,” as Mr. Harris puts it, of society. Investigative journalism, or the newspaper’s role as a watchdog for corruption and crime. Mr. Harris says that “investigative journalism is important in the business perspective: a news organization can spend the time doing this and building [their] brand, whereas amateur writers and less established organizations can’t do this sort of thing.”
It might be in the newspaper industry’s best interest to capitalize on investigative journalism, and other features that remain unique to print newspapers. Anyone can set up a website, but not everyone can move from blogging online to delivering newspapers. “People aren’t paying just for the content but a service. The service is to have stories printed and delivered on [your] doorstep,” says Mr. Harris.
But newspapers also might do well to appeal to potential readers who don’t have a lot of time on their hands. Everyone can conjure up an image of a man or woman sitting at their kitchen table on Sunday, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper. But the idea of skimming articles in the morning, on the way to work, or in the evening isn’t as popular. Many feel guilty if they let issues of their newspapers build up over a week in the mailbox, unread.
So although providing content online is a more efficient delivery method for newspapers, roadblocks still remain. Gina Chen at The Nieman Journalism Lab, a project of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, writes: “The truth is, for me, not subscribing — either in print or online — has little to do with money. It’s about commitment. And I think that’s the problem many news organizations are facing as they try to bring their products online.” Ordering a newspaper for a year, five or six days a week, is a large commitment. Isn’t it more freeing to simply read news at your own pace, from any number of different online sources?
Newspapers need to find a reason to draw you away from other news sources, or else they will not offer customers anything they cannot get elsewhere for free. If The National Post and other newspapers are to succeed in the long term, they will need to differentiate themselves from both each other and the myriad ways consumers have to find news on the internet.
Gina Chen at the Nieman Journalism Lab recently published an article about a shift she wants to see in how journalists write. Where once the goal was “avoiding the near occasion of subjectivity, not true objectivity” now she wants journalists “who are bold and perhaps sometimes brash but who aren’t afraid to tell it like it is. I want journalists who feel something way down in the pit of their beings, and who aren’t afraid to show it.”
I don’t usually see this kind of attitude in newspaper articles (not including editorials and such things). But in blogs? All the time. For example, take a look at this excerpt from Daniel Fienberg’s blog, The Fien Print:
I Don’t Like Everything. Sorry. No matter how much TV I watch and no matter how much TV you watch, we’re not going to like all of the same things. So if you really enjoyed “Sex and the City” or “Carnivale” or “Boston Legal,” we’ll just agree to disagree on those shows. That’s just how these things go.
Some people reading The Fien Print might be turned off (especially if they’re fans of “Sex and the City” or “Boston Legal”). But the benefit of writing without trying to hide your personality outweighs the loss of a few readers: everyone who can agree to disagree with Fienberg or simply agrees with him will feel a bit more connected to the blogger behind the blog.
So while the article in question from Fienberg isn’t exactly a hard-hitting news story, readers of blogs may have come to expect a similar connection to their favourite newspaper columnist. This might have something to do with why Gina Chen from the Nieman Journalism Lab now wants to see more of who journalists are rather than simply reading their report on, say, the latest election. I know that this is true for me. I enjoy reading articles from journalists or bloggers whose personality I am familiar with from more than just the material they choose to write about.
A more subtle example of personality coming across through writing is the current Lexington columnist/blogger for The Economist. Take an excerpt from the short post, “Banning straight marriage by mistake”:
This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognise any legal status identical or similar to marriage.
Got that? The state may not recognise any legal status identical to marriage. Such as marriage.
This sounds like the libertarian argument that we should separate marriage and state, but I guess that wasn’t what they meant to say.
In my opinion (look, an opinion!) this post gets two things across: the fact that Lexington (Economist writers are anonymous) has a personality and that he isn’t afraid to let it shine through in his writing. Maybe this type of writing will catch on in newspapers or other forms of offline journalism; I for one hope it does. The growing popularity of blogs (blogosphere revolution? blogstorm? blog bang?) as substitutes for traditional journalism outlets is a sign of change in the industry, and journalists should choose to learn and adapt rather than stagnate.
