Thanks for comments on the first draft, especially to Philip Young who gave me some lengthy feedback. The main point of which was that I was lumping all blogs together. SO I've fundamentally re-written it and put in a lot more stuff and now its 5,000 words. You can Download it here.
Or read the introdiuction and conclusion below.
1. Introduction
Blogging offers the enticing prospect of a new journalism which is more participatory, more responsive and essentially open to anyone who has something to say. Yet, the process of creating blogs that are rich with quality journalism is also a commercial challenge; one that will re-shape the blogosphere as we move out of an initial period of amateur enthusiasm to create a more mature and sustainable medium.
The media - today, yesterday and tomorrow – is shaped by an unavoidable commercial reality which is the relationship between the cost of content and the ability to attract the revenue that will pay for it. Content determines audience size; audience size determines advertising and subscription revenue; revenue determines the resources that can be allocated to content generation. And so on forever.
Generating a steady stream of quality content is expensive even for ‘stand alone journalists’, as Jay Rosen has called them . These bloggers must find ways to pay for what they do if they are to sustain it as anything other than a sidelight to a core business activity or a sporadic recreation.
So far the main contribution of bloggers to public discourse has been fact-checking, commentary, oodles of commentary, and the blogging of conferences and meetings. The prime difference between these early blogging styles or activities and stand-alone journalism is the capacity to generate original content in the form of reportage.
If bloggers are to provide a sustainable, credible alternative, or complement, to traditional media they need to do more than replicate the op-ed and letters pages of newspapers, or the ‘sounding-off’ which is the meat and potatoes of talkback radio.
Only a few bloggers seem to have any serious prospect of generating enough revenue to be able to provide journalism outside the constraints of corporate media. The funding models they are relying on revolve around advertising, sponsorship and less reliably, donations. Already, most of the world’s top bloggers have ads on their sites. These are traditional media revenue-generation models and to make them work bloggers have to generate large audiences. The need to create and sustain large audiences will have important consequences for the future structure of the blogosphere and relationships between bloggers.
At the same time, large corporates, governments and not-for-profit organisations are using blogging to by-pass the media (including journalist bloggers) and speak directly to their audiences. They are much better placed to take advantage of the ‘web as publishing environment’ than all but a few individual bloggers.
These organisations have the resources to generate rich flows of content, and the brands to build audiences. Their blogging efforts will grow strongly over the next few years and have an important influence over the evolution of the blogging medium. But will blogging change corporate culture, or will corporate culture dull the early edginess of blogging?
5. Conclusion: Big blogs, little blogs
Bloggers who want to be commercially-viable (i.e. earning a living) stand-alone journalists providing free content funded by advertising revenue in one form or another will face new constraints. They will have to move well-above the tiny niches of the long-tail to create mass audiences even if they are smaller audiences than traditional media. In addition, they will have to accept codes and practices which allay advertisers’ concerns about their unpredictability.
Most bloggers will always have tiny audiences and this will necessarily restrict their capacity to generate ‘journalism’ in significant quantities. Together these bloggers form a ‘long tail’ but it is a tail rich in commentary and personal experiences not news reporting and investigation. The tail will supplement the content generated by traditional media (including stand-alone journalists) but it is not a serious alternative to mainstream news-gathering.
Corporations have the resources to generate content but they are likely to do so in a somewhat looser format than the tightly constrained and lame efforts that currently get passed off as ‘communications’. In time, big organizations might become comfortable engaging in blog-style ‘conversations but this won’t happen anytime soon.
We could see, as the blogosphere matures, the emergence of two blogospheres. A top level of relatively few blogs focused on building and maintaining commercially-attractive audiences and a second layer of blogs more focused on extending their networks and communicating with a few people. The interesting question is: will these ‘blogospheres’ diverge with the second layer feeling increasingly alienated by the concerns of the top layer?
None of this means blogging isn’t an important new medium. It just means that we should be realistic about what it can and can’t do, and recognize that even in this brave new world bloggers share some constraints with traditional media and with current corporate communicators.
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