The Pied Piper of Blogging
Spokesman-Review.com has been one of the most aggressive news sites in adopting the Weblog format. Ken Sands, managing editor for online, talks about his paper's blogging in an E&P interview and throws out a somewhat novel idea for incorporating the Web into election coverage: "Newspapers are resistant to change despite decades of evidence that they are increasingly irrelevant. To me, a perfect example is the way many metro papers cover elections. They assign one reporter to every race, and election stories are strung together in a seemingly endless parade in the months leading up to an election. Today, the county treasurer, tomorrow the county prosecutor, the next day city council position 1, blah, blah, blah."No one reads that crap. Even worse, it's the kind of stuff that turns people off to the newspaper entirely. And what about the 40% of people -- in our state -- who get their absentee ballots three weeks before election day? Oops.
"Instead, we should bundle print election coverage in special sections, once when absentee ballots go out, and again before election day, and spend the rest of the print space and TV airtime promoting the searchable, sortable, complete information on the Web. It's one-stop shopping for voters, and fits much better for how people actually use information. In fact, I envision a time when a print edition is more of a guide, or index, to information that's available everywhere else. We print TV guides in the paper. Why not print Web guides to news, entertainment, etc.?"
Aug 06, 2003 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(1)
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1 comments about 'The Pied Piper of Blogging'Pied Piper, huh? A lot of horn tooting and self puffery, if you ask me
Posted by Bill Johnson at August 11, 2003 2:30 PM
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