New York Times Is Getting Clueful About Blogging, Sort Of. Get Real: Stowe Boyd's Soapbox

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Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies. His new blog is Message.

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December 08, 2005

New York Times Is Getting Clueful About Blogging, Sort Of

Posted by Stowe Boyd

The New York Times Deputy Managing Editor, Jonathan Landman, recently sent out a memo to the staff about blogging (as reported by LA Observed), and some of it suggests real insight into what's going on:

[from CyberJournalist.net - New York Times memo on blogging]
But our new blogs are more than running commentary. Look at Carr’s. It’s full of links to film publications and blogs and web sites. It encourages responses from readers and hopes to start a lively conversation. Nothing is more important to the future of our web ambitions than to engage our sophisticated readers. Blogs are one way to do it.

It’s worth spending a little time thinking about blogs, and about ourselves. Blogs make some newspaper people nuts; they’re partisan, the thinking goes, and unfair and mean-spirited and sloppy about facts. Newspapers make some bloggers nuts; they think we’re dull and slow and pompous and jealous guardians of unearned “authority.”

It’s a pretty dopey argument. Indeed, some blogs are lousy. So are some newspapers. Some blogs reject journalism. Some practice it.

The point is, a blog is nothing more than a piece of technology. It allows people to compile thoughts, connect with others and interact quickly with readers. People can use it any way they want to. It has no inherent ethical or moral quality, though it does have its own special power.

We’ll use the technology our way. Our bloggers will have editors. They will observe our normal standards of fairness and care. They won’t float rumors or take journalistic shortcuts. Critics and opinion columnists can have opinion blogs; reporters can’t. (To quote Carr: “If the Carpetbagger delved into plot or relative quality – they didn’t turn me loose for my refined cinematic taste � flying monkeys would come out of the ceiling here at headquarters and behead him.”) We’ll encourage readers to post their thoughts, but we’ll screen them first to make sure the conversation is civil. Some bloggers will accuse us of violating blogospheric standards of openness and spontaneity. That’s life in the big city.

We will use blogs to convey information, sometimes in conventional ways, sometimes not-so. Our notions of journalistic responsibility are perfectly compatible with spirited fun. Do we put David Carr online to be witless? Um, no. Actually, we think he’s pretty witty in the newspaper.

Blogging does impose obligations. Blogs have to be updated frequently. They have to be carefully tended. There are costs; David Carr and Damon Darlin will be spending time they could be using to write newspaper articles. Their bosses have decided that’s an advantageous tradeoff. I agree.

So he, and the NYT editors, by extension, are getting wise to the blog phenomenon. They are trying to use the elements of blogging that appeal to them -- like high involvement with sophisticated readers, and the ease with which you can reference other things in the web -- but they are rejecting certain notions that have become pillars of the blogosphere. It's the New York Times, and they aren't going to walk away from the whole editor/reporter mumbo jumbo, and the myth of objectivity and all that.

And, despite sounding relatively clueful, his statement -- "The point is, a blog is nothing more than a piece of technology." -- is likely to be taken out of context, and misconstrued as yet-another-mainstream-media guy who just doesn't get it.

In fairness, I think he gets a lot of it, but in the final analysis, I think he falls short of getting it all. He is still framing the discussion, implicitly, as mass publishing news and opinion to relatively passive readers. He believes that 90% or more of the value in the relationship is being created by the New York Times, and as a result, he is not really concerned with the opportunity for the actively-engaged reader to create any serious amount of value. He is missing the social media part: it's merely a publishing tool to him.

So these guys will be "blogging" but they won't be joining the blogosphere, at least not officially. We'll see what actually happens, when specific individuals are in the mix, day in and day out. We'll see.

[Pointer from Steve Rubel]

[tags: new+york+times, Jonathan+Landman, social+media, mainstream+media]

Comments (31) + TrackBacks (1) | Category: Media

COMMENTS

1. Tim on December 8, 2005 04:48 PM writes...

hmmm... interesting... just a reason to think about this problem.

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December 08, 2005

New York Times Is Getting Clueful About Blogging, Sort Of

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