So I’ve just finished readskimming the eleventh blog post on the imminent demise of newspaperdom. There’s a lot of hope in the blogging world. I get the feeling that many of the luminaries actually think the entire industry is about to collapse, and chaos, I mean blogs, will rule the information world.
That scares me. I’m having a hell of a time lately recognizing true credibility / authority vs technorati authority (vs no authority.) As Michael Arrington puts it, bloggers have a tendency to roll in the ready, fire, aim manner. Let your readers do the fact checking in the comments. The issue here is that even if a correction is posted, most readers will never come back to the article. So even in the case of TechCrunch, I have to factor in some ambiguous margin of error.
So what happens if objective news coverage turns into ready, fire, aim reporting in its forced migration to the interweb? It’s an issue newspapers are going to have to overcome as they transition.
I hope it doesn’t follow the path of newspaper classifieds. We have a company vehicle listed on cars.com right now (ClassifiedVentures is newspaper-owned.) There’s a thinly veiled scam behind 9 out of ten leads coming in from the site. That doesn’t do much for credibility.
Newspapers definitely have a big bounce to pull off. But, I’m not ready to give up on them yet. My prior job may still be influencing that, though. (Seven years ago I was an Online Mgr for a Gannett newspaper.)