New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen (whose PressThink blog is popular among alt-media enthusiasts like ourselves) and a collection of journalism students just completed a study of blogging by the nation’s 100-largest newspapers. Rosen’s team rated newspaper blogging efforts by various criteria, coming up with overall scores by which the newspapers could then be compared.
The runaway winner? The Houston Chronicle, which has launched dozens of Movable Type blogs under the leadership of Dwight Silverman and Scott Clark since the newspaper’s clumsy early attempt to embrace the medium.
Dwight Silverman takes a bow over at his Tech Blog, and it’s well deserved. Anytime your newspaper finishes first in a systematic study — and literally blows away the competition — that’s a big deal. Good for the Chron.com crew for helping show the way for other big newspapers (although we wish the Chron.com folks would have given at least a nod towards the Greensboro News-Record, which was ahead of most newspapers in embracing blogs and “news as conversation” and was happy to share its vision with Silverman when he was still in research mode).
The study is interesting as a macro-level comparison of newspapers, but as is well established, our perspective here is micro-level and hyper-local. With that in mind, a couple of quick takes from me and Anne on the study and the Chron-blogosphere are below the [Read More] link.
ANNE’S TAKE
Congratulations to Chron.com, for outstanding blogging recognition. It’s well-deserved.
I do hope that in the (not-too-distant) future we’ll see a local politics blog and a traffic blog. It’s welcome that we now have a White House blog with Julie Mason, but if Chron.com really wants to up its Wow! factor, it should hustle together a Kristen Mack/Matt Stiles blog and a Rad Sallee blog.
Every morning, KTRH-740’s morning news is a cornucopia of Houston/Harris County tidbits, tidbits that might not be worthy of complete news treatment in the dead tree Chronicle, but would be perfect in a World Class City Blog. This morning, for example, KTRH reported that Council approved an increase in city employee health care, which will cost taxpayers $16 million more per year with a $25 surcharge for employees who smoke; Council approved $50,000 to pay for outside legal representation to fend off HPD officer Tom Nixon’s case (something the city’s legal department can’t handle apparently); more money will be directed toward the city’s embattled crime lab; and more fallout from Bonusgate that has Mayor White looking to change how payroll is managed for councilmember employees, and the admission that the city has been hampered in its ability to fire the four employees in the Mayor Pro Tem’s office due to civil service rules.
And can you imagine how busy and engaging a Move It! Blog would be?
One more thing: as far-sighted as the Chron.com crew has been, there are still serious substantive problems at the Houston Chronicle, problems with content, editing, direction and thinking. All the tech-wizardry at Chron.com can’t hide those problems.
KEVIN’S TAKE
The sheer number of Chron blogs, their consistent look and feel (including comments, a feature bloggers take for granted), the ease with which they can be found, and the fact that non-Chron folks have been asked to start blogs seem to be the drivers responsible for Chron.com blowing away their MSM competition.
I’m not sold on the extent to which the non-Chron bloggers add value to the Chron.com news enterprise. That’s not to say they aren’t potentially interesting, or that the Chron.com label/vetting process isn’t useful in providing local blog readers some assurance of quality. But it remains to be seen whether those blogs will actually enhance the core news mission of the Houston Chronicle in some fashion that isn’t clear to me now.
As to the Chronicle bloggers themselves, that’s been mostly a good move for the newspaper. Print columnists like Richard Justice, John Lopez, and Loren Steffy have embraced blogging and (to a lesser extent) the local blogosphere, interact with readers, elaborate on their columns and their general areas of expertise, and (in the process) make themselves more compelling news personalities. Substantive topical blogs by Dwight Silverman, Eric Berger, Lance Scott Walker, and Sara Cress/Joey Guerra are especially nice, because they recognize other blogs and news sources AND provide material that would never fit in the dead-tree newspaper (in the case of Walker and Cress/Guerra, their local focus is also notable). Cartoonist Nick Anderson’s blog (with comments and trackback) is an excellent addition. The Enron trial blog is an excellent use of blogging to enhance the newspaper’s core mission (news reporting).
But, it’s only fair and balanced to point out the Chron misses (About: Chron and the misnamed Big 12 football blog). Ironically, the Rosen study cited the About: Chron blog as a hit:
“The thing that really got me was About:Chron,” writes Lauren Dzura. It’s editors-explain-newspaper. “It gave me a more personal relationship with the paper.”
Locals, of course, know that it’s not editors-explain-newspaper, but instead it is sometimes-beleaguered reader representative James Campbell occasionally defending (poor) Chron editorial decisionmaking. And “occasionally” is being generous. “Infrequently” is probably more accurate. Despite Campbell’s pledge to readers that he would be posting more regularly this year (including details of the newspaper’s daily news budget meetings), there has been hardly any blogging at all; Campbell has posted a whopping seven times in 2006! That blog just hasn’t worked out, and should be terminated. Ditto the misnamed Big 12 football blog (really a Big 12 sports blog), which also suffers from infrequent posting (despite two contributors), complete lack of awareness of the sports blogosphere, poor writing/editing, and occasional problems with attribution that lead entire posts to be pulled with no explanation.
As Anne suggests, the Chronicle has much more room to expand its blog offerings in terms of news. Julie Mason’s blog is a start, but why not a group blog from the Chronicle‘s D.C. bureau? And the Austin bureau, for that matter? And the city’s metro reporters (they could do worse than following the lead of KHOU-11’s news blog)? And the Chronicle editorial board itself? Those are the sorts of substantive offerings that would impress local alt-media enthusiasts.
Good for Chron.com in being ahead of other newspapers — now keep on pushing the envelope!
BLOGVERSATION: TBIFOC, Jim Thompson, Lou Minatti, The Bernoulli Effect, On Message, A Certain Slant of Light, Isolated Desolation.
