{"id":258882,"date":"2014-06-26T16:42:00","date_gmt":"2014-06-26T21:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=258882"},"modified":"2024-01-27T16:43:26","modified_gmt":"2024-01-27T21:43:26","slug":"can-the-new-york-times-kill-its-blogs-without-losing-the-soul-of-blogging-in-the-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2014\/06\/26\/can-the-new-york-times-kill-its-blogs-without-losing-the-soul-of-blogging-in-the-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Can the New York Times kill its blogs without losing the soul of blogging in the process?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The New York Times<\/em> has been gradually shutting down some of its blogs over the past year or so, including its environmentally-focused Green blog<\/a>, and this week the newspaper company confirmed that it plans to shut down or absorb at least half of its existing blogs, including its highly-regarded breaking news blog, The Lede. As the Times<\/em> describes it, the plan is not to get rid of blogging altogether but rather to absorb and even expand<\/a> blogging-related skills and approaches within the paper as a whole. But will something important be lost in the process?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assistant managing editor Ian Fisher told Poynter\u2019s Andrew Beaujon<\/a> that the newspaper is going to continue to provide what he called \u201cbloggy content with a more conversational tone,\u201d but that it will appear throughout the paper\u2019s website, rather than in specific locations called blogs. While high-profile brands like Bits and DealBook will remain, other smaller blogs will be shut down or absorbed into the sections of the paper that fit their topic \u2014 although Fisher wouldn\u2019t say which specific blogs were destined for the boneyard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A blog is just an \u201cartificial container\u201d<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As far as the reasoning behind the move is concerned, Fisher mentioned a number of things in his Poynter interview, including one technical reason: namely, the fact that the Times<\/em>\u2018 blog software doesn\u2019t work well with the paper\u2019s redesigned article pages \u2014 and Times<\/em> staffer Derek Willis suggested there were other<\/a> technical benefits in a discussion on Twitter. But Fisher also said that many of the blogs didn\u2019t get a lot of traffic, and that not having to fill a specific \u201ccontainer\u201d with content would free up writers to spend their time doing other things:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201c[Some blogs] got very, very little traffic, and they required an enormous amount of resources, because a blog is an animal that is always famished\u2026 [and the] quality of our items will go up now, now that readers don\u2019t expect us to be filling the artificial container of a blog.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As Willis pointed out during our Twitter conversation, blogs are \u2014 from a technical perspective at least \u2014 just one specific kind<\/a> of publishing format, with posts that appear in reverse chronological order. But for me at least, this is a little like saying that a sonnet is just a specific way of ordering text, featuring iambic pentameter and an offset rhyming scheme. Obviously not every blog post is a poem, but there is something inherent in the practice of blogging (if it is done well) that makes it different from a story or news article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"New<\/a>
New York Times building logo, photo by Rani Molla<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer once said that<\/a> the essence of a blog is \u201cthe unedited voice of a person,\u201d and I still subscribe to that view. Blogging has grown up to the point where even something like The Huffington Post is described by some as \u201ca blog,\u201d which effectively stretches the meaning of the term beyond all comprehension. But it\u2019s more than just a reverse-chronological method of publishing, or the fact that you include embedded tweets or a Storify, or even that you link to other sites \u2014 although it includes all of those things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absorbing can also mean weakening<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When it\u2019s done properly, as Lede writer Robert Mackey often did, it\u2019s a combination of original reporting, curation and aggregation, synthesis and analysis, and an individual voice or tone \u2014 and all of that done quickly, and in most cases briefly. As Brian Ries of Mashable argued during a discussion<\/a> of the Times<\/em>\u2018 decision, the problem with trying to absorb the blogging ethos into the paper as a whole is that not all of those skills are going to be present in every writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[tweet 481940828685107200 hide_thread=\u2019true\u2019]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This reminds me of when newspapers started to absorb their web units into the larger editorial structure. In the early days, the web was a separate operation \u2014 in some cases even in a different building, as it was with the Washington Post<\/em>. The best part about this arrangement was that it allowed those who worked online to develop their own practices and to some extent their own ethos. When those units were absorbed, some of that was watered down<\/a> or even lost completely, as editors and writers more focused on print took precedence. That arguably retarded the progress of those papers towards a more digital-first future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, I think that while the motivation behind killing off blogs might be the correct one \u2014 that is, a desire to get away from the format as a specific destination and find a way to get everyone to experiment with blog-style writing and reporting, regardless of where they work \u2014 the risk is that the latter simply won\u2019t happen. In other words, some of the momentum that having a blog gives to the skills I mentioned above will be lost, and along with it some of the innovation that blogging has brought to the Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Shutterstock \/ Alex Kopje<\/a> and Rani Molla<\/em><\/p>\n

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The New York Times has been gradually shutting down some of its blogs over the past year or so, including its environmentally-focused Green blog, and this week the newspaper company confirmed that it plans to shut down or absorb at least half of its existing blogs, including its highly-regarded breaking news blog, The Lede. As the Times describes it, the … <\/p>\n

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