This week the discussion revolves around a case study of what my last two posts have been debating. This comes from a lecture by Shane Richmond called ‘the what, why and how of newspaper communities’. As the Communities Editor for the Telegraph and a regular blogger on the media there surely can be few others better people to talk about this.
Two Telegraph foreign correspondents started blogging in 2005 and now there are around fifty blogs penned by Telegraph journalists. The topics are wide ranging and aim for different niches. Shane Richmond says that the blogs, which work best, are opinionated, for example Damien Thompson’s blog on Catholicism. There is a very obvious niche audience for this blog and it remains popular with readers. However they don’t have to be aimed at such a small community for example the political blog Three Line Whip has a much broader audience with less narrow interests according to Shane Richmond. Yet it is updated regularly and does have a niche audience making it increasingly popular.
Two Telegraph foreign correspondents started blogging in 2005 and now there are around fifty blogs penned by Telegraph journalists. The topics are wide ranging and aim for different niches. Shane Richmond says that the blogs, which work best, are opinionated, for example Damien Thompson’s blog on Catholicism. There is a very obvious niche audience for this blog and it remains popular with readers. However they don’t have to be aimed at such a small community for example the political blog Three Line Whip has a much broader audience with less narrow interests according to Shane Richmond. Yet it is updated regularly and does have a niche audience making it increasingly popular.
Yet it is My Telegraph which is much more interesting to look at. On the site anyone has the opportunity to blog with a community already provided for him or her. Much has been said about building up traffic to blogs, well with My Telegraph that community is already there. A very recent example is Politics Cymru, a blog on blogger started last week and is promoting itself on Twitter and updating at least once a day.
Therefore, what I find slightly scary is that there is now a group of people blogging about whatever they like (within legal reason), are they doing the journalist’s job? I don’t think so yet although think it is something we need to watch. My Telegraph gives people opportunity to add their personal feeling to the news, this means journalists must ensure that the represent the feelings of the masses. At a recent lecture with Kate Adie she said journalists must ‘mirror’ society – I believe that as long as journalists remember this then the profession isn’t under threat.
The other problem is that of moderation, the laws ruling the media in this country are very strict and online media must also stick to these. Shane Richmond points out that moderators are always at risk however they chose to moderate their sites. Another problem is expense; it is expensive to employ people to moderate user’s content before it is published. The Telegraph combine, reading blogs before posting and more commonly don’t read posts unless they get complaints about them.
Like all other posts, I cannot claim to know where the online revolution will lead us in the media industry (if I did I’d be very rich now I imagine). My Telegraph has an older average of contributors disputing thoughts that only young people are online. Online is definitely here to stay but I doubt anyone knows in what form.
Till next week…
Newspapers picture courtesy of http://flickr.com/photos/edwardfilms/ (creative commons)
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