Most major media companies today are trying to incorporate blogging into what they do.
They are finding it exceedingly difficult.
That's because good blogging comes from passion. It's spontaneous. The best media efforts I've seen so far have lived in one of three categories:
- Media company hires a blogger to do what the blogger was doing anyway.
- Media company blogs an event live.
- Media company lets its writers blog on their own time, within the media company's site, and someone runs with it.
When a media company says, you will do X number of words per day on our blog about subject Y, what you have isn't a blog at all, but a column.
Passion is tough to fake. Talent is rare. The ability to produce interesting stuff on a regular basis, about anything, requires both passion and talent.
Want to know why this blog is good? (No one has to tell me it's good.) It's because I've been doing this kind of work my whole life. I produced 7 stories per day at Newsbytes, nearly 20 years ago now, and did a weekly radio column as early as 1970, when I was 15. Ever since I got my first typewriter, at the age of 8, communicating with words was all I wanted to do. And I instintively move toward immediacy, toward the moment -- I'm not terribly reflective and don't think long-term.
This makes me a masterful blogger.
There are other ways to get here. There are as many good ways to blog as there are good blogs and good bloggers, and there are a ton of them.
But every good blog starts with passion, a passion for the subject and a passion for communicating. Not every journalist has this. The bureaucratic nature of the journalism business tends to militate against this. Those with passion tend to burn themselves out before they can rise to the top of the stack, where the columnist jobs are located.
That's why blogging has uncovered so much undiscovered talent. But there's not all that much of it. It's a thin seam of high-quality ore that's going to be played-out fairly quickly. It's not something everyone can do, not something e everyone can do well.
That's just the way it is. And the sooner media companies get their arms around these concepts, bringing in passionate people to blog about their passions, rather than trying to fit blogging into their corporate cultures, the sooner they'll become successful at this.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Corinna Hasofferett on October 13, 2004 09:14 PM writes...
Problem is that fortunately the media wants you to somehow speak in their vein, while a blogger is a blogger as long as s/he uses her unique voice alone.
Permalink to Comment2. Eitan Caspi on October 29, 2004 12:34 PM writes...
Wow!
Man, I LOVED this post. Simply brilliant.
Right to the point, clear and solid.
Give yourself a raise! :)
Eitan
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