I’ve been out an ‘bout riding the past week, but occasionally during my travels I’m pulled into discussions about blogging and the troubles of the newspaper industry.
It goes something like this… the newspapers are doing all the “real” reporting, and your blog as well as many others are merely “rehashing” the news without having done any real research.
I have a viewpoint on the topic and part of the problem is that “real reporting” and “news” are not that easy to define. For example go to Google News right now and type in “Harley-Davidson layoff,” which indicates there are 262 articles on the same subject. I am sure that there are not 262 reporters out there gathering H-D layoff news firsthand. How many of these represent (and are monetized by) the people who actually did the original news reporting, and how many of them are rewrites, copies, or blog posts about the original news reporting? If you type in “Michael Jackson drugs” the number jumps to 15,373!
It’s naive to think that news is only stuff like H-D plant closures, Michael Jackson’s death, a UN summit, a car accident; in short, stuff that requires a reporter to do the good old fashion reporting, which includes going there, attending the press briefing, taking a picture, calling people and asking for statements, etc. Yes, that’s news. But I’ll tell you what’s also news.
- A summer Poker Run – bring 2 cans — which benefit the local food bank
- A benefit ride to support a fallen veteran
- The CoC meeting and motorcycle legislation topics
- I upgraded the TC-96 to Synthetic oil and the clicking noise went away
Who writes about these things? Blogs. This is why blogs are popular, not because they’re rehashing news from big media publications, writing their opinions without contributing any facts. They’re popular because somewhere there’s a person who took great interest in figuring out how to do something and then write about it. Like that person who determined which airplane seats are the best to be seated in and started a blog writing about it… you can’t find this information in any major newspaper!
There’s another common misconception about blogs: the newspaper industry acts as if all the blogs were the same. A blog can be a lot of things. There are blogs with one writer who write about motorcycles once a week. There are motorcycle blogs with a full staff who write 20 posts per day. Some blogs only do opinions. Some do rumors, some do original reporting, some do reviews, and some mix two, three, or four together.
This is why every attempt by the newspaper industry to define a common “enemy” that’s killing them will fail. They’re dying the death of a thousand cuts, and focusing on splogs (which are, most blog publishers will tell you, pretty much irrelevant in terms of stealing traffic) or aggregators will achieve nothing.
The fact is that blogs are here to stay, that many of them are valuable, that they’re attracting eyeballs and some are even taking a piece of the ad revenue pie from newspapers.
are you kidding? the media has a problem with blogs? well i have a problem with the media, as a matter of fact, i have had a problem with the media which stems back many years. it has to do with truthful journalism and reporting, as well as bias. i’ll stop before you have to get out the censor bleeper… pppppfffffttttt…