Online News Association

Blog panel notes

Jeff Jarvis

November 2003

The first step is not to start blogs but to read them.

Link to them.

Make them stars.

We’ve owned the printing presses for centuries. Now, at last, in this medium owned by its audience, everyone else has a printing press and the power that goes with it. It’s time for us to listen first.

With all due respect, this panel should not be here. In our place, you should be hearing from a half-dozen bloggers outside this business who, frankly, can’t stand much of what we do. They have legitimate complaints. They have different interests (we should all compare out front pages with the most-linked stories at Blogdex or Technorati). We should be listening to them. For as one blogger, Anil Dash, said recently, weblogs don’t compete with journalism, they compete with bad journalism.

Weblogs are the audience’s content first.

We believe in audience content at Advance: Forums are a third of our traffic, up to 100 millinon page views a month, up to 1 million page views in one day in one market in just one forum.

In forums, the audience exchanges news, information, and viewpoints. They also make connections. They give us content.

Weblogs are a higher form of audience media for two reasons:

First, their authors take on the pride of proprietorship. This isn’t Saturday night at a bar. This is a party at my house.

Second, the links mean that quality rises. On the web, it’s not content until somebody links to it.

I started my own blog, buzzmachine.com, only when I had something to say. I decided to make it personal, not professional, so I could learn more. And I did learn how this is more than content. This is truly community. I have made friends around the world here.

My weblog helped inform, then, how to start up weblogs in the company.

First, we enabled our own staff to start weblogs, which unleashed some frankly pent-up creativity. Besides Denise, Scott Brodeur at MassLive found a lesbian stand-up and a radio sports guy. NJ.com blogged sports teams and even the beach.

Next, we are working on hyperlocal weblogging. No large newspaper or online service can get to the town level. So our first question is whether citizen bloggers can get us there. The second question is whether automated advertising can bring in an entirely new population of advertisers at a price that is right because there is no cost of sale or production and it is extremely targeted. We’re testing in Northampton, Mass., and in markets in NJ and Cleveland.

We are also creating an auto weblog that will, we hope, be the first of many topical weblogs that also have advertising benefits.

I’m looking at extending this to ethnic groups.

We have more than 75 weblogs up now and that will explode.

Note that we’re not planning to become a general host; we’re not a service company; we’re a content company (and an interactivity company).

Are these journalists? No. Is this journalism? Yes. It is an extension of audience content. It is information. And we are in the information business.

The audience has a voice and is using it. Note that when I had a snit fit about this organization because I was invited to be part of this panel – as part of the content for the event – and then was charged for the privilege of coming, I went mildly berserk. But note that my reflex was not to email somebody on the board. I blogged it. Immediately. I felt far more affinity to my weblog audience than I did to my colleagues here. This is a new and transparent world. And you – and your newspapers – need to be aware of that. Andrew Sullivan is given some credit – perhaps too much – for ousting Howell Raines and Gerarld Boyd from the New York Times and there are other webloggers dying to do the same in their towns. Many of them don’t like us. We can ignore them. We can try to take over their medium. Or we can listen to them.

I see some journalists smart enough to listen. The Tribune has a reporter, Maureen Ryan (for whom I wheedled an invitation to yesterday’s cocktail party) trolling the Internet for stories. Smart. National Review columnist Michael Ledeen – who’s quite disliked in some Iranian circles – nonetheless entered into dialogue with Iranian webloggers on their blogs and earned their respect. New York Post columnist John Podhoretz saw a post I wrote about a 9/11 show and got me to write an op-ed for the paper. The New York Times mentioned Gawker in a page one story a few weeks ago. The wise reporter and editor and producer reads and listens. The dumb ones don’t.

After Dan Okrent got what I call the worst job in journalism as the public editor or ombudsman of the New York Times, I wrote about that on my weblog and he responded to me in email. I blogged that, in turn, and heard from some delighted webloggers. Dan knows that his job – our jobs – are a conversation.

All this audience content is terribly powerful. It brings in new news, information, and viewpoints. It can reshape media and democracy.

If you don’t believe that, look at what weblogs have done in Iran. I’ll tell the story of Hossein Derakhshan and his weblog revolution in Iran. And of Zeyad and his weblog in Iraq.

One man, Hossein Derkhshan, an expat Iranian in Toronto, started the Iranian weblog revolution simply by telling people how to blog in Persian. Two years later, there are up to 100,000 weblogs from Iran and Iranians about politics, women’s rights, sex, sports, music. They are creating and exercising their new rights of free speech. They are getting their story to the rest of the world. They are doing this at personal risk, for one weblogger, Sina Motallebi, was arrested and is now awaiting trial for what he said on his weblog.

Whenever we think that we’re part of some media revolution, we should look to these Iranian webloggers for a reality check.

And after the war in Iraq, I said on my weblog that I hoped for a similar blossoming of free speech and weblogs there. A few weeks ago, a 24-year-old dentist named Zeyad emailed me and said I’d inspired him to blog, which he does now at Healing Iraq. He gives us a fresh perspective on what is happening there, a perspective no reporter is or can give us. And he so far has gotten four other Iraqis to do likewise.

I constantly hear people in our business talk about the need for diversity. Well, weblogs give us diversity – diversity of news, opinion, and viewpoint, diversity of sources. Even from Iraq, weblogs give us diversity.

I want to leave you with this comment from Hugh McLeod, a cartoonist and smart blogger. I asked my readers what they wanted to say to you (you can find the link to that and to these notes on Buzzmachine.com). And here’s what Hugh said:

Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as "things", rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things. A Joi-Ito-like [Joi being a central weblogger] brain trust, held cohesive by good editor. Some of the cluster will be paid (the journalists), others won't (the audience). But everybody is welcome to contribute, and is kinda working together with the same goal: to create the most vibrant intellectual collective that they can.

Think about that way of thinking about things: We newspaper people as the town square around which our communities congregate, as the Oprahs keeping the discussion going. Online is a discussion. To misquote Cluetrain, markets are discussions. Discussions are two-way, many-way, no longer just one-way, us to them. This is about listening and responding, not just telling. This is about the audience having a voice now. Listen first, then talk. Read first, then publish. That is the moral of the weblog story.

Comments from blog readers asked what they want to say to ONA….

I would love to see some blogging on the behind-the-scenes editorial process, about where stories come from, which ones make page one (or web equivalent) and that sort of thing. I've always wished we could have a c-span channel devoted to covering editorial meetings at news entities like the New York Times. I think a blog could provide much of the same. If a news organzation feels this would be dangerous, then that's a sign that something's wrong, something they probably ought to fix. Transparency, in other words, would be a huge service to the public.

Posted by Jeremy Brown at November 7, 2003 05:37 PM

Jeremy: the problem with that is, it gives away the stories you're working on ... if you've got a big scoop in the works you don't want to broadcast it to the world.

Posted by tom at November 7, 2003 07:04 PM

Tom: that's true, I can see the problem. But discussions after the fact could be very valuable too, e.g. "here's the foreign affairs editor on why we ran so many stories on Nairobi last month" or "Here's why we rejected this story that was later picked up by the Guardian." And also general practices: "This is why we sat on the XYZ scandal for 3 months: when you get this kind of story, you've got to do A, B and C before you run with it...last year, for example..." I don't know, I'm probably being naive. You occasionaly hear news people talk about this stuff in interviews and I always find it intersting. Maybe it's just journalism 101, but in this form it would give an opportunity for readers to question some of these practices and decisions.

Posted by Jeremy Brown at November 7, 2003 11:54 PM

Well, newspaper blogs live and die by the same rules as any other blog. Just the newspaper will have more resources to put behind it than a regular schmoe.

The best blogs didn't start off with some big master plan. They started of with (a) the desire to blog and (b) the desire and ability to be engaging. Lots of trial and error. I mean, when you strted Buzzmachine did you know what would happen? I'm guessing you didn't. I'm guessing you just started doing it, and the whole thing took on a life of its own.

You don't make a big 'plan' to be engaging. You just get on with it. If what you're writing has enough passion and knowledge behind it, then good things will happen.

The proccess is organic: it's not what you do, it's the way that you do it.

How genuine the newspaper's desire to engage the blogosphere is the most important thing. Unlike a traditional, storefront-shaped website, blogging is not about creating a "thing", it's about creating a "process".

So my advice to newspapers would be: think about the intensity of the process you want to create, rather than the actual website itself. To only do the latter would be putting the cart before the horse.

Posted by hugh macleod at November 8, 2003 12:19 AM

Hugh has excellent comments. I would add the medium's desire for telling the truth. If the idea is to sell their own spin, stay home. I have enough to wade through here on the nblogosphere.

Posted by kkl at November 8, 2003 12:29 AM

Make sure you tell them they have their business model completely backwards.
Currently they give away the news and charge egregiously for the olds.
$2.95 for a week-old article? In England we called last weeks newspaper 'fish-wrap'.
They post their first edition online hours before it hits the streets, meaning that by the simple expedient of staying up late, Andrew Sullivan can have a rebuttal of the NYT editorials online and ready before the paper is thrown onto the driveway.

Free the archives, charge for the breaking news.

Posted by Kevin Marks at November 8, 2003 03:58 AM

i.e. "fish-wrap" because old newspaper is the traditional English wrapping used for fish & chips.

Perhaps online newspapers should stop seeing themselves as "things", rather a point on the map where wonderful people cluster together to do wonderful things. A Joi-Ito-like brain trust, held cohesive by good editor. Some of the cluster will be paid (the journalists), others won't (the audience). But everybody is welcome to contribute, and is kinda working together with the same goal: to create the most vibrant intellectual collective that they can.

Hmmm... somebody must've spiked my drink.

Posted by hugh macleod at November 8, 2003 06:18 AM

Perhaps blogs could be used as an adjunct to the traditional "letters to the editor"? Facilitating a discussion on specific editorial positions?

And of course, giving local columnists a wider forum. I've had the good fortune to corresponde with local reporters and columnists via e-mail. Their "personal" comments have been most illuminating. Further public discussion might be equally so.

One wonders if the Old Media will regard a writer's blogging as an additional task to be done in addition to their regular writing or if there will be a slight reduction in their work load in order to facilitate posting blog entries?

Posted by Dann at November 8, 2003 09:34 AM

> I've had the good fortune to corresponde with local reporters and columnists via e-mail.'

You're on to something there... if reporters had blogs they could post their answers online to provide the same info to anybody else wondering the same thing.

The problem is implementation: a reporter might get 50 emails in response to a single story, and might opt to reply to, say, two or three. How do you allow all those other questions to be posted -- and the reporter to respond only to the ones he chooses -- without making the reporter look like he's ignoring everybody else, or, worse yet, has something to hide because of all these unanswered questions?

The problem w/interactivity is that it doesn't scale well from one person to a large audience.

Then again, if every reporter's story was posted in blog form with a comments feature attached, questions could be posted and others who know the answer could provide it, the same way they do here and at every other blog that has a comments feature.

Posted by tom at November 8, 2003 02:07 PM

Hey, it's Darwinism. The NYT gets thousands of letters a day- it publishes the best half dozen. The same will apply to blogs. It has nothing to do with scaling- The strong survive, the weak are culled, depending on the space available- the same applies to blogging- get over it.

Posted by hugh macleod at November 8, 2003 04:56 PM

The scale argument is Clay's and it is somewhat specious. Blogs scale fine; it is email that doesn't scale.
Let people post comments on their own blogs and link back, and the smart journalists will be able to find them with Technorati or google.

Posted by Kevin Marks at November 9, 2003 02:15 AM

Jeff has repeatedly pointed out that the reading Public often knows stuff that the Media reader doesn't know.

In this case the Media should announce a 'Weblog Fever' rush period during which local bloggers should submit or nominate blogs in their neighborhood that are exciting.

That will enable the Media Hub to 'seed' some blogs into their blogroll and should start them off with something.

Posted by button at November 9, 2003 11:53 AM

There will be plenty of cuddly things said, no doubt, so here are a few bricks to hurl at the pompous pulp-pimps.

Remind 'em that bloggers have something a newspaper can never have -- personality. Bloggers don't need to consult a committee before grabbing the latest news or technology and shaking it to pieces. Bloggers will work weekends because they are working for themselves, not The Corporation. And bloggers participate in the fastest energy slinger since the cyclotron -- the blogosphere.

Finally, pick some smirking simp in the audience and ask how big is the circulation of his 100-year-old newspaper. Point out that with 1/500 the manpower and with just a few hours of work a day, some two-year-old bloggers are already reaching more readers and changing more minds. And, le coup de grace: blog audiences are growing 10% a month, while his employer's is shrinking 1% a year.

Posted by henrycopeland at November 9, 2003 09:22 PM