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Is Blogging Killing Newspapers, or are Newspapers Helping Blogs?

Blogging isn’t hurting newspapers. Newspapers are helping blogs grow.

Many months ago, someone named Stephen* presented me with an interest question to my statement about whether blogging was killing newspapers. He said that maybe it wasn’t that blogging was killing newspapers, but rather it was the decline of the quality of newspapers that have lead to an increase in blogging.

The Indianapolis Star from November 5, 2008

Over the past several years, I’ve seen how Gannett (owners of USA Today) have decimated the local reporting staff at the Indianapolis Star. They get rid of people who know how to report and write (and yes, there’s a difference). They get rid of well-known writers that bring regular readers to the paper in favor of a couple of recent college grads who — together — make up 75% of the salary of the original writer. They have bombed out the newsroom, eliminated business writers, booted popular columnists, and slashed the different culture and dining critics. To add insult to injury, the design work for the Indianapolis Star will soon be moved to Louisville. All we’re left with is a sterilized husk of what was once an awesome newspaper.

The Indianapolis Star, when it was run by the Pulliam family, actually won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, for its outstanding reporting in exposing police corruption in 1974. (The Indianapolis Star, when it has been run by Gannett has, well, not.) I’ve been reading the book by Dick Cady, one of the reporters who helped break the police corruption story wide open, and I sometimes wonder if I’m reading about the same newspaper.

I’m reading a newspaper that wasn’t afraid to go up against local law enforcement for the sake of truth, justice, and the American way. Meanwhile, I’m left with a newspaper whose median years of newsroom experience is slowly drifting toward the single digits.

And yet Gannett can’t figure out why newspaper ad revenue is dropping like a rock. I’ll tell you why: no one wants to read the Indianapolis edition of USA Today. But that’s what we’ll be left with in less than five years (some former Indy Star readers and employees think five years is overly optimistic).

Blogging is not to blame for this. Blogging has not harmed the Indianapolis Star. Blogging did not make Gannett fire people like columnists Ruth Holladay or Lori Borgman, or business writers like John Ketzenberger. Blogging did not kill what was actually a profit-making online venture by replacing the editor with someone much younger.

Instead, blogging is picking up the pieces that Gannett and other big-city newspapers are dropping whenever they gut their newsrooms yet again.

There’s a great blog on the southeast side of Indianapolis called (what else?) Southeast Indianapolis Communities. It’s a simple little blog that has nothing but news for the southeast side of town. They’re covering the news and events that the Indy Star won’t and can’t cover. They’re doing the kind of reporting that the Star doesn’t have the staff, time, or even city knowledge to adequately write about.

Basically, Southeast Indianapolis Communities is filling the gap left by Gannett’s mishandling of the Indianapolis Star, and they’re doing a great job. In this case, SIC hasn’t hurt the Star. Rather, the growing crappiness of the Star is helping the SIC.

What about your newspaper in your city? Is your newspaper holding on, or are you seeing the same decimation and ruin that we’re seeing in Indianapolis? Tell us about your city’s newspaper and if you’re seeing any local blogs picking up the slack. (And tell us about those too.)

My book, Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself (affiliate link), is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. I wrote it with my good friend, Kyle Lacy, who I also helped write Twitter Marketing For Dummies (another affiliate link).

Stephen, I can’t find the post where you commented with this great insight. If you’re out there, let me know who you are, so I can at least link to a Twitter page or your blog, or something.

Photo credit: afagen (Flickr)

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A Look at Old School Journalism

When I wrote for my college newspaper, the Ball State Daily News, one of the things I liked to do was to put some paper in the manual typewriter, hammer out a few sentences, rip it out of the typewriter, and yell “COPY!!” which would always crack my editor up.

This was back in about 1988, when we thought that kind of news writing — furiously banging out news copy on clackety old typewriters — was old-fashioned, and that nobody did it anymore. After all, we were nearly at the 21st century, using dummy terminals to put all of our news into a mainframe that would process the story into a single column, where it could be printed, cut, waxed, and pasted up on the layout page.

The fact that I just used terms that most younger readers don’t know — paste up, wax, typewriter — probably renders the whole COPY!! joke unfunny.

I recently spoke to some journalism classes at Ball State about how to blog for newspapers. I tried referencing a few of my student journalism experiences, and even told an OJ Simpson story, and was met with blank stares. I didn’t realize until later that many of these students were born the year before I got married. They were two when the OJ Simpson trial was going on.

Still, I always appreciate the history of journalism, and I like knowing things about it, like the fact that copy boys were the boys who ran around the newsroom, grabbing papers out of writers’ hands. Writers who had just ripped their story out of the typewriter and shouted “COPY!!”

I was interested to find this video in a post, “How to be an Old School Journalist,” on Alltop.com. While the segment at 5:06 may be a little… upsetting, keep in mind that the video is around 70 years old.

Although I’m not sure exactly how old the movie is, you get some clues just by looking at the hats and suits, the cars, and even the phones. It’s an interesting look at what they thought of journalists — and women — back in those days.

It’s even more interesting when you realize how far we have come as a news gathering society.

  • According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, we produce as much data in 2 days as we produced from the dawn of history up to 2003.
  • More women blog than men. In fact, the Blogher Network boasts 2,500 women bloggers as part of their network alone.
  • A story written for a blog can be produced in minutes, not hours. Publication of a post is immediate. No typesetting, printing, or delivery. Hit Publish, and it’s out there. A news story can be written in minutes, but then it has to be pasted up (electronically, of course), and then printed, and delivered. The shortest amount of time it can take is 4 – 6 hours from the completion of the story.
  • To own a major newspaper takes millions of dollars and requires specialized knowledge to run specialized machines that only serve one purpose: to put ink on paper. To run a major blog takes a $1,000 laptop and a wifi connection. And when you’re done, you can watch a movie on it.

In Linchpin (affiliate link), Seth Godin talks about how the factory, the means of production, can be owned for $3,000 for a laptop (Seriously? $3,000? Seth, call me. I’ve got a deal on a few Dells for you, 2,000 bucks each.)

Bil Browning, owner of the Bilerico Project (the largest LGBT news blog on the web) runs his blog with four directors/editors, and 90 contributors (I even contributed an article last year). But he doesn’t have an office, doesn’t have printing presses, doesn’t have any overhead, other than his servers, and the salaries for him and his four directors. When I compare the low cost — $1,000 for a laptop — and ease of which he is able to reach hundreds of thousands of readers each month versus the time and effort we put into reaching people via newspaper today versus the time and effort we put into reaching people via newspaper 70 years ago, it’s a wonder we ever got it done at all. It’s also easy to see how Bil is able to reach his readership much more easily and cheaply than most big city newspapers.

Watch the video, see how our grandparents and great-grandparents got their news and information, and see if you’re not amazed.

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Social Media Makes Us Citizen Journalists

Social media doesn’t just make us consumers of news, it makes us part of the news.

We’re no longer relying on the mainstream media to inform us. In many cases, we’re reporting it ourselves, or at the very least, spreading it beyond the traditional media’s original reach. I can’t count the number of stories I heard about on Twitter, Facebook, or a friend asking me, “hey, did you just hear about __________?”

In some cases, it’s just a link that points back to a story in an online newspaper. It could be a tweet from @IndyStar, it could be a retweet of a story in another part of the world, or it could even be a blogger reporting on news with national ramifications that is still only making ripples in their local media.

My point is we are starting to create our own media. While the mainstream media may sneer and look down their noses at bloggers as citizen journalists, the fact is they are coming up with some interesting stories, often breaking the news before the professionals.

In fact, the Associated Press has gone so far as to not only acknowledged the existence of bloggers, but will even now cite them as a source.

“We should provide attribution whether the other organization is a newspaper, website, broadcaster or blog; whether or not it’s U.S. based; and whether or not it’s an AP member or subscriber,” said the Associated Press’ September 1 online press release.

In other words, they may not like it, but they have to follow their own rules about us.

This is just one more indication that citizen journalists are becoming more important to informing our communities and discussing the things the professionals don’t. This is also one more reason why citizen journalists need to act like real journalists, and not the half-assed rabble rousers they assume us to be.

Want more proof that citizen journalism is continuing to grow? There are a growing number of sites that aggregate our citizen journalist news for us, so we can read more stories about our favorite topics in one location.

  • Newsvine: Community driven news. They reprint wire content, and some members have their own blogs. This one has all the same sections as a traditional newspaper.
  • NowPublic: A citizen journalist network where users do their own reporting, upload videos and audio.
  • The American Reporter: The Internet’s first original content alternative daily newspaper. They publish news from journalists and citizen journalists from around the world. They were the first to break the story about the A.A. Milne estate suing Disney for royalties of Winnie the Pooh. (Disclosure: I have been AR’s humor columnist since 1997.)
  • SB Nation: A collection of sports news, blogs, and scores. It’s done in conjunction with Yahoo Sports, but also a collection of 278 sports blogs from around the country. It’s easy to see a single network — ESPN, Sports Illustrated — covering sports this thoroughly, but SB Nation is able to put it together for a fraction of the cost.
  • Autospies: A collection of automotive news organized by and for automotive enthusiasts. If you are an automotive professional, you may hear breaking news here before you get it in your other industry publications.
  • Tip’d: A finance, investing, and business site that works like Digg. You read a story, “tip” it, and then discuss it.

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Wither Goest the Newspaperman? Why Blogging is Killing Print Media.

Whither goest the newspaperman, that bastion of bulletins, that purveyor of print?

He is, I’m afraid, about to be swallowed up by the electronic era.

When I was in college, I wanted to be a reporter. I wanted my stories to be delivered with a thwack! on the front porch. To be folded up and carried in a suit pocket. To be clipped and stuck to the fridge. I wanted to use words like “lede” and “slug line.” I wanted to rip my story out of a typewriter, and shout “COPY!” (I used to do this when I wrote for my college newspaper, to great laughs from my editor.)

Sadly, it was not to be. Instead, I work as a professional blogger, and am looked down on by “real” journalists at “real” newspapers. (Full disclosure: I am also a newspaper humor columnist, appearing in 10 weekly print newspapers around the state. So there.)

Last year, 53 weeks ago in fact, I wrote a humor column about Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky, who wrote his own column sneering at bloggers with:

I DON’T have a blog. If I did blog, this is what it would be like. (To make it seem like a real blog, I’ll include typos and factual errors.)

I would link to Stu’s original column, but it, like most of his fellow newspaper reporters, are no longer available. They have been cast aside, presumably to make room for newer, more up-to-date pieces.

Bykofsky, who is perhaps best known for saying this country “need(s) another 9/11” needs to realize that blogging is not going to go away. Newspapers, on the other hand, are fast disappearing from our landscape. I think reporters would do well to rethink their attitude.

To paraphrase Chicago humorist Rex Huppke (@RexHuppke):

It’s funny when journalists mock (blogging). It’s also funny when people about to be eaten by a bear mock the bear.

Huppke’s quote was originally about Twitter, but mocking a bear is mocking a bear.

So what are the journalists’ complaints about blogging? That we didn’t go to journalism school? They’re teaching electronic media writing in J-school right now. That our pieces aren’t properly fact-checked and vetted by editors? Disgraced plagiarizer fabricator New York Times reporter Jayson Blair could tell you a thing or two about that. Or is it that our stories aren’t printed on dead trees? I found Bykofsky’s original column online.

Citizen journalists — the people who are picking up the slack that the mainstream media are missing — have taken to the web to cover the news and write about the issues that journalists have been missing. If they’re not former journalists who became bloggers, they’re learning how to do proper journalism. The really good citizen journalists are writing stories that are just as good, if not better, than a lot of the mainstream media stories.

These modern day pamphleteers share the news and their opinions via a blog instead of a printing press. And while they are still looked down on, these citizen journalists have uncovered a lot of stories that Byofsky and his ilk have ignored, overlooked, or scorned. We’re breaking the news before The News does.

Griping about bloggers is nothing but pure elitism. Snob journalism at its finest. When children start playing a game, it’s not uncommon for the child on the losing team to pout, whine, and make excuses for why he’s playing poorly. And Bykofsky’s blogging gripes make him sound like he’s taking his ball and going home.

The newspaper industry has been in decline ever since the advent of radio and TV news. It slipped further into decline when Craigslist became popular. And now, blogging is threatening to be the final stake through print journalism’s heart.

We’ve seen significant gutting at our local paper (the Indianapolis Star will now be laid out in Louisville. Sounds about right for Gannett.), and journalists are being thrown overboard left and right.

A friend of mine worked for the Associated Press in Indianapolis, and was let go right before Christmas 2009, after 17 years of service. Why? The AP was losing money because fewer newspapers were licensing their content. So rather than stick with the professional who had the most experience and best judgment, they let him go in favor of someone with a lower salary and less experience. In another state.

So we have younger, less experienced journalists — remotely — running our country’s newsrooms, and it’s bloggers who are being dismissed out of hand as Not Real Journalists?

I’m sad to be watching all of this unravel. I think the decline of the big city American print newspaper is one of the great tragedies of our time. But I also see the future of the industry, and if it’s going to survive, it’s going to be online, not on dead trees.

Journalists need to stop deriding blogging, and embrace it instead. Learn how to do it now, rather than watching it pass by. You can either mock the bear or turn and face it. Otherwise, your next byline will be from the south end of a north-bound bear.

For related reading, check out:

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The Growing Need for Bloggers as Citizen Journalists

Two bits of interesting news this past month for bloggers who consider themselves journalists:

I’ve been preaching for a while that bloggers are citizen journalists. And now we get confirmation that 52% of us believe it to be true, and that 61% of Americans are possible readers. Plus — and this is a big one — the last-reported numbers from Technorati are that 77% of all Internet users read a blog of some kind.

The time is ripe for bloggers to begin thinking of themselves as citizen journalists. Social media is making it so much easier for us to not only see the news, but report it as well.

Social media is breaking the news before the news.

We’ve seen several instances where social media broke news stories before mainstream media picked it up. The three most notable examples have been:

  1. The first images coming out of Haiti were on Twitter, because mainstream media couldn’t get on the ground. People with cell phones and spotty wifi were sending photos to Twitter and Facebook, and we were spreading them around like wildfire. My family was particularly interested in one set of missionaries in Port-au-Print, and @TroyLiveSay was providing information that we weren’t getting anywhere else.
  2. Moments after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, news was spreading on Twitter before the shots had even stopped.
  3. When the US Airways flight landed in the Hudson last year, news had broken on Twitter 15 minutes before the first news reports hit the airwaves.

While none of these examples show a failing of the mainstream media, they show that in many cases, people reporting on incidents that happened nearby ended up being first just because of the widespread nature of the tools.

I’ve been playing with Posterous as a possible blogging platform for rapid response and crisis communication professionals. You email your blogs to your email address (it’s actually just post@posterous.com), your subject line is your headline, you attach any photos, type and format your content in your text box, and voila! You’ve got a blog post sent from your smart phone.

And I totally geeked out a few days ago, when Chris Brogan showed how you can take photos on your digital camera, and immediately have them uploaded to your favorite file sharing service, with something the size of a quarter and something else the size of a pocket calculator.

My advice? If you have even the slightest inclination of being a citizen journalist, start taking your blogging seriously. You don’t have to change the scope of your blog, your writing style, or even the quality of your writing.

Just do it with intentionality. As hard as it may be to explain (this is the 6th time I’ve written this paragraph), report your news for posterity. Do it with a sense of responsibility and gravitas. When you see something happening, take photos and upload them to Flickr or Picasa. Send tweets. Email news to your blog. Be a source of information to your community. Don’t just repeat what you’ve seen, report on it.

Even something as simple as reporting a small incident you just witnessed can sometimes lead to national or even international stories, or you may be the lone voice that speaks for someone who can’t do it themselves.

While I’m not suggesting we all change our focus and become word slingers, I am suggesting we adopt the mindset that we’re just as good as the professionals who, I’m sorry to say, just aren’t as quick as the “ordinary citizens” armed with nothing more than cell phones and a serious case of Twitter-thumbs.

Related posts:
Rules for Being a Media Blogger
Defining Two Types of Crisis Communication
Five Things Newspapers Can Teach Us About Blogging
What Stylebook Should Bloggers Use?