Blogs: September 2008 Archives

September 3, 2008

I know it's no big revelation that news blogs are popular. They have been for a while and their popularity keeps growing. For some reason, though, I just never thought that a blog coming from a more traditional news outlet would be in the same league as a blog that stands on its own, like The Huffington Post.

I guess that when the TV and Newspapers started blogs, I sort of saw it as a ploy to get to the hipper, younger crowd in the same way that the Gap ends up adding stores to every corner in parts of town that were once cool for being a little rough around the edges. I didn't think they would carry that much weight, but like the Gap, they do.

My company's websites have been adding blogs like crazy...blogs covering news, sports, weather, celebs, wedding planning, weird news, and lots more. These blogs have been gaining such a huge audience that we've had to add servers twice this year, so far, just to handle the traffic.

After the last rash of crashes, I received an email from an editor telling me how important it is to make sure our blogs stay up, since they are "the lifeblood of what we do..."

As dramatic as that sounds, it seems to be moving in that direction as news providers see that the less formal style is what people are looking for, even when looking for serious news. Also, during huge stories like hurricanes or political stories, where content is being updated minute-by-minute, blogging software can be much easier to use, since the majority of CMS's tend to be much slower and more convoluted. We are finding that by putting blog headlines in place of the "normal" ones during breaking news stories, the information can be presented much faster and can be more up to the minute.

The less formal tone as a reason for the increasing popularity of news blogs is interesting though, as Ed Pilkington from the Guardian points out in this article. He is primarily writing about a nasty comment that McCain made several years ago that wasn't reported by the media, but he made an interesting point in the difference between British and American media and the popularity of blogs:

"Such coyness has long been ingrained in the US media, which has an annoying tendency to regard its readers as wayward children in need of moral protection. That's one important reason, incidentally, that blogs are doing so well in the US - they have no such scruples and behave in ways more akin to the British than the mainstream American media."

Aside from the ability to get news that is more current through news blogs, is it maybe even more relevant that people are tired of receiving sanitized, over-edited news? Or at least it is becoming more important to people to balance the sanitized news with the messiness of blog reporting. That and the ability to interact is becoming more important to people as well, and even though more news providers are adding the ability to comment on traditional articles, the community that develops from the less formal blogs seems to bring people back.

It's really cool to see a technology like that blossoming at an alarming rate and to see it become less of a geeky thing and more of an expected thing.

By kim | Permalink | Comments (0)