Can You Tell the Difference Between a Blog Post and an Article -- and Does It Matter?
Farhad Manjoo used his regular Slate column recently to muse upon the convergence of journalism and blogging. Rather than the usual hand-wringing over the debasement of journalism, Manjoo was concerned with the evolution of writing on the web. Would the advent of Gawker Media's new design platform -- which turns the famous blogging success story into a web magazine -- be the final blow to any meaningful distinction between blogs and magazines?
That's no idle question. At stake in this convergence of content are two big questions:
- Has blogging has outlived its usefulness?
- Or has it simply come of age, and if so, what are the best ways to present news and opinion now that the web has undisputably become the center of gravity for journalism?
As the coverage in the surviving newspapers expands, blogs allow their reporters to maintain niche audiences while still feeding the front page. The news ecosystem has gotten much more variegated. It's not uncommon for some of the lead writers at the NYT and WSJ to maintain a running relationship through regular posts on small items while still using that string to build up a bigger ball for articles.
Those blogs have become places to report items that don't yet add up to stories. Manjoo's question deals with a distinction in form. How is a blog post different from an article? And does it matter?
Over the last few days I contacted various bloggers and editors at big sites around the Web to ask how they define each term. The answers I got were surprisingly diverse-while each of these organizations has its own rules for what it calls a "blog post" and an "article," the rules aren't at all consistent across newsrooms. [...]That's a nice way to cleave the two, but hardly satisfying. In a world where the news cycle is so fast -- and in which so much evidence or information is available on the web -- the second-day story is rapidly becoming more like the second-hour story. And it probably won't always be driven by a direct interview between the writer and newsmaker. So, are those articles or posts?Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel (she stepped down from the editorship this past June), says that she sorts posts on the site into two mental categories. Pieces that are primarily "reactions to something that already existed in the media or on the Internet" -- the bulk of Jezebel content in its early days -- are "blog posts." But Jezebel also publishes many essays that are not riffs on outside material. These weightier, original pieces aren't set off in any special graphical way on the site, but Holmes still thinks of them as articles, not blog posts.
The Washington Post's Ezra Klein felt Manjoo's question hadn't gotten nearly enough attention. So he wrote his own post groping for a definition which comes down to a simple question about whether his reader is in the club or not:
The difference, for me, is in the writing. If there's explanation to be done, it's done in a link. [...] The fact that my readers are mostly regulars [...] drives both the writing and the organization of the content. A blog post is a part of a discussion, and that means you don't start from the beginning and you don't have to get everything out in your first comment.Both of these ways of looking at form and content are interesting and instructive. What's missing from them is any discussion of the economics of journalism. Writers tend to want to imagine that stuff takes care of itself (though how could you think that these days?), or that it is something worked out by the business folks whom they consider to be a necessary evil but still a sidelight to the industry.An article is more like a lecture. You start from the beginning. [...] You try to say everything you need readers to hear, as they're not likely to be around for a follow-up.
Form and content, however, are as much a function of the economics as anything else. Blogs emerged from the margins and only become viable on large sites where impressions can be aggregated against ad dollars. Magazines are migrating toward blogging to increase the visibility of their writers but also to generate pageviews. Unfortunately, they're doing this exactly at the moment where it's become apparent that online ad rates will never catch up to print.
Slowly, we're beginning to see a move toward protecting the more valuable content. That also happens to be the more formal, less conversational, content. News itself might soon be a commodity and the community building of blogs might also be some sort of a loss leader, but there's still a chance that the distinctive voice and point of view that comes from the assemblage of facts, context and commentary that distinguishes the best of journalism is something readers will be willing to pay for.
If that's true, a better distinction between articles and posts might be that articles are more likely to generate revenue than posts. For those bloggers lucky enough to have a choice of outlets there will always be a balance between speaking directly to readers and other writers through blog posts or adding more value through writing more formal articles.
Let's call this dilemma the choice between reach and revenue. Blogging arose because newspapers and magazines put their content on the web for free to expand their audience. Bloggers extracted quotes from stories and created new content by re-contextualizing those quotes. Blogging is more intimate, informal and free-wheeling than writing for "publication." Blogging is open; article writing is closed.
The openness of the web seems to be ending but most outlets are still eager to have their work linked to and discussed. Which moves the question from whether anyone will pay for journalism distributed electronically to whether blogging can survive once journalism goes back behind a paywall.
Image Courtesy of Brett L. via Flickr