Jeff Jarvis talking about the trouble with newspaper blogs in general, which tend to lack focus. I quite agree with him when he suggests,
So I think that if newspapers are going to blog, they should have lots of blogs at lots of addresses, lots of peop…

And to shamelessly self promote: http://www.pharmalot.com A great blog from a newspaper, but free of the overhead that comes from the mothership.

I’m one of four Ohio bloggers writing at a new effort between Cleveland.com, The Plain Dealer and four bloggers. It’s called Wide Open,. We’ve got two left of center from NEOhio and two right of center Cincy area bloggers who contribute. We went live last Monday.

Is it going to work? Who does it actually work for? We’re hoping all of us but no illusions. If people aren’t already comfortable with cleveland.com or don’t read the PD, or one of the four blogger’s personal blogs, I’m not sure how readership will increase or what purpose it serves other than to add value to cleveland.com and the PD – which I believe will be obvious far earlier than adding value to any of our individual blogs. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but what does it really do as far as stretch new media? Maybe a little but probably not a lot.

Best case scenario? It’s part of a media literacy effort to get people from print into online sources. Worst case scenario? It doesn’t?

It’s an experiment, that’s for sure.

We all have them, you know. And not all as nice.

Dwight Silverman’s blog, http://blogs.chron.com/techblog/, is a blog that I read everyday. Dwight writes on a wide variety of tech topics and has legions of fans on the net.

I happen to live in Dallas but the Dallas Morning News’ website is terrible. It takes forever to load the DMN website, so I have quit going there. Primarily, I get my news from chron.com and elsewhere on the net.

IMO, the Houston Chronicle is an example of a newspaper getting it right. One thing that I can always count on with TechBlog is that I am going to always read about the very latest technology development on the net.

Dwight posts anywhere from 2 to 6 posts every day, so it keeps the conversation lively and interesting, especially with his many readers chiming in with their comments. His posts are much more like sitting down and having a conversation with him over a cup of coffee.

Kudos to Dwight and the Houston Chronicle.

…I’m just sayin’

Jeff, I addressed this very topic (blogs working with or against traditional media) on my own site, and included a screenshot of your site. Hope you get the joke.

I think it just comes down to their lack of a good formula, but a lot of industries are adjusting to this and I don’t think bloggers should get too cocky or comfortable.

Interesting points, but I think you and Sicha are presuming something that’s not true. Yes, newspapers have blog indices, but that doesn’t mean smart newspaper sites aren’t doing the other things as well.

Online newspapers have a dichotomy of readers. Some of them WANT the stratified navigation of a traditional newspaper applied to the online product. Any newspaper site that has done a redesign has heard from them, bigtime. They are more traditional and expect a newspaper to be, well, a newspaper, even online. And they are legion.

That group is very different from the digirati, who live by RSS feeds, aggregators, link-tracking, etc.

At the Houston Chronicle, we do both. You want an index page for blogs? You got it. You want RSS feeds? They’re there — but we also offer an index page of RSS feeds! You want us to link out? We do that.

There is a LOT of information at the average newspaper site. Pointing all the various constituencies to all of it is a daunting design task. We can definitely do better. But again, just because we do X doesn’t also mean we can’t do Y, too.