Just back from I spending some time in Brigantine and Atlantic City, NJ.
The weather? Doesn’t get any better. The fishing? Could have been alot better. (shark, seabass, and some baby flounder that we had to throw back)
And while sitting in a boat, waiting for what seems like forever for a bite, you get to do alot of thinking. You ponder stuff like: why do some guys wax their eyebrows, how can I lower my cholesterol, and why do old school journalists look down their nose at bloggers ?
Ever since I attended the Blog Philadelphia conference a few weeks back, I’ve been focusing alot of my limited brain capacity on these little buggers called blogs. To the snooty, blogs are just amateur writings, one level above a message board rant, and likely written in your mom’s basement, while you were wearing pajamas.
Some foolishly believe that to truly be a journalist, you would need years of schooling, and be published in a print product that can be bought at a newsstand. At one time, this was certainly true. Getting a job at the newspaper wasn’t easy, printing presses were tough to get your hands on, etc. Even if you had phenomenal knowledge of a particular subject (like deep sea fishing for instance), it was a long shot that you would get published.
But today, with free and easy blogging tools and the ability to “publish” online, an expert in deep sea fishing (with some half decent wrting skills and a computer), could likely find a boatload of online readers that would love to follow his posts on a regular basis.
This scares the bejesus out of newspaper and magazine folks. They have lost their choke hold on the printed word.
Same thing with video. No need for a TV broadcast tower. YouTube or Viddler will do just fine. Who would you prefer to engage with…….an expert videographer with limited knowledge of the subject matter, or an expert in that subject matter with OK video skills ?
I would take the latter. How about you ?
How about one more analogy: would you prefer to listen to hi-definition, CD quality audio of stale top 40 tunes, or would you rather have an acceptable audio quality (128k) mp3 collection of any and all available music ?
Niche and choice, wins out all the time. We are willing to sacrifice super quality, for super choice.
Getting back to my blog on blogs………Scott Karp over at Publisher 2.0 writes: The word “blog” has way too much baggage — it’s too often equated with opinion. But a blog is just a content management system, and you can use it to publish shrill opinion, or you can use it to publish traditional journalism…or you can use it to publish journalistic reporting with a bit more point of view.
Most newspapers are actually using blogs as platforms for daily online publishing — platforms that allow one person to publish a “mini-publication.”
This got me thinking — maybe what newspapers should become in the digital media era is a network of local bloggers — some of whom are staff writers and some of whom are freelancers.
Read more of Scott’s analysis here:
One of the toughest parts of integrating social media tools into a radio station website is plugging in those tools which listeners actually want to use on a radio station site as opposed to wherever they’re accustomed to using them now.
