Nielsen/NetRatings yesterday released December 2006 statistics showing that Web traffic to the blog pages of the top 10 online newspapers grew 210% year-over-year. The unique audiences for those newspapers’ sites were up 9% year-over-year, presumably due in large part to some of the pull by the blogs.
Unique visitors to those papers’ blogs accounted for 13% of the sites’ traffic in December 2006, up from only 4% in December 2005. The unique audiences for the blogs skewed male (66%), no surprise given the early adopter nature of men versus women.
These are all very impressive statistics and will no doubt fuel even more blogging at the nation’s top newspapers, but I continually wrestle with the existential question: what is a blog? As Jeff Jarvis points out, some newspapers may be using blogging software as content management technology when the content doesn’t, by most definitions, reflect “blogging.”
Did the Nielsen/NetRatings research take this distinction into account? Moreover, where does traditional journalism end and blogging begin? Nobody can answer this question, particularly given that traditional journalists are the bloggers at most newspapers — and indeed throughout the blogosphere.
One easy way to distinguish a blog entry from traditional journalism is if the surrounding publication has in its name the word “blog.” The Wall Street Journal, for example, clearly segregates its blogs by calling them that — the Law Blog, for example.
But, not all newspapers do this. The New York Times’ David Pogue has his own website section called “Pogue’s Posts,” which is clearly a blog (the URL reflects that), but do most readers understand this? Does it even matter?
It matters according to the old school principles of professional journalism because journalists, as opposed to bloggers, are supposed to free themselves of opinion, bias and informality when reporting the “news.” Otherwise, the content should be considered editorial or analysis.
Moreover, old school journalists are supervised by editors who, among other things, seek to winnow out opinion, bias and informality. Bloggers, on the other hand, are free to express themselves, and indeed take pride in their personality-driven prose, and rarely submit copy to higher-ups for review.
Blogging is also considered a sideline, or a footnote, to true reporting at newspapers, although sometimes blogs get greater prominence on newspaper websites than do the true journalistic articles. The WSJ’s Law Blog, for example, is at the top of the “legal” section of the paper’s website, prominently and alluringly boxed off from the rest of the content. It looks more important than anything else on the page.
For those of us who write and read blogs all day long, it’s usually pretty easy to distinguish a blog from traditional content. But I’d wager that most readers have a very difficult time telling the two apart. And I wonder just how the Nielsen/NetRating methodology took the differences into account.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:55 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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