When I was an undergraduate, one of my professors told me that the non-news blogs and Web sites I read regularly are much more important the newsy ones. The reason was because news doesn’t happen at news organizations, it happens on those other sites. News just centralizes the information from these other sites.
The problem for me at that time was that I read nothing but news…constantly. My favorite Web site was CNN.com, and I didn’t really read blogs religiously. Outside of that, the time I spent online was used to do work– look up information, e-mail people and friends, etc. I really didn’t think of the Internet as a place to hang out, and I was so involved in news that I had no where else to go but news sites.
Now, things have changed. I’ve found myself attracted to some humorous blogs and I follow some pretty interesting people on Twitter. Also, I think the way people post on social media sites has changed in the past year or so. More people are posting information and less “going to sleep” statuses.
However, I’m not sure I’m getting what I was supposed to (or at least what the professor expected) out of these sites. Instead, I’ve really been thinking about why I continue to go back to those sites regularly. What are they doing that is attracting me and the millions of others who look at them daily?
Here are few reasons I think readers return to these sites:
- The writers have a voice. I connect to the writers of the blogs I read because I can picture them talking to me and telling me the story of the day.
- The site is updated with new content. I don’t mean just a summary of something they saw on another site, but actual new content for the world to see. Original and creative….They add another perspective.
- Lots of pictures. I know as a writer, I should be looking at other writer sites, but I really love blogs such as Cake Wrecks and Probably Bad News more than text-based sites (like mine). It’s not that the pictures are great quality as much as they attract my attention because of what they are pictures of. On Cake Wrecks, for example, you could easily look at the blog reading a word the author writes and still be entertained. It’s like when you read a magazine at the gym. You’re not really reading the magazine (if you are, you’re not working out), you’re just looking at the pictures because they distract you from the task at hand.
I’ve always hated the idea of a news writer adding voice into a story, but I’m starting to see why some news organizations are testing it out. I think though that one of the reasons these sites are great is because the people who are hosting them are PASSIONATE about the subject matter. Have you ever noticed that the quality of news writing went down after newsrooms started looking for general assignment reporters? I, for example, loved politics. You could tell in my stories that I enjoyed the things that go on in politics. My writing was more poignant, and the stories had more sources and more diversity in them because of that same passion. On the other hand, I really disliked covering the weather, and you could tell. It’s not that I disliked covering events that happened becuase of the weather, but I hated just writing a story about the fact that it snowed that day. The stories like “it snowed yesterday” are never written as well as the ones done about real news.The real news is how I judge news sources too…I believe a news organization is trustworthy if I consistently see them striving for true investigative journalism, and not just the obvious facts.
Maybe that’s where news organizations went wrong…they dumbed it down so much that they lost their credibility and authority in the process.
Forrester’s 80% is a great number for NYT. In reality, 99.9% of the world’s population will never pay for NYT and have no value to advertisers on that site.
News publishers only made one mistake. They created web sites before they had a business reason to do so.
A long time ago reporters did have a voice in their writings. You trusted the things they said because they were the reporters and they were paid to check their sources, get to the bottom of the story and then craft their report about what they found out. They were allowed to take opinions, call one plan better than another because they had reason too. Of course this also meant there was an opposing view.
The news is not just the information of the day, it is how the information impacts my life. We did news right when every town had two newspapers (often one liberal and one conservative). The cable news wars, despite the problems of a 24-hour news cycle are trying to do it. But the real work is still being done in the blogs, where reporters are still digging, evaluating, then reporting. Yes some are hacks that spout off only opinion with no research, but many others are out there doing real, very important work.