Newspapers Can't Be Blogs

Greensboro, North Carolina's News & Record wants to incorporate blogging into its newspaper. According to an article written for the Los Angeles Times by Martin Miller, some of the steps that they have taken, or are contemplating, are:

• Inviting bloggers to editorial and budget meetings
• Attracting readers as much to the website for its staff-written articles as for pieces by citizen correspondents.
• Bloggers engaging in an ongoing online conversation with the staff, editors and themselves.
• Converting print reporters into bloggers.

All of these bullets illustrate the fact that Media People just don't get it. What they don't get, is that Media People only see, and are only interested in, and can only comprehend, the paint on the outside surface of the buildings that constitute life. Real People exist in the structure, walls, foundation, wiring, plumbing, and the life that goes on inside the buildings that are life.

Media People drive down the street and think "Oh, there's a brown house, there's a white house, wow, there's a really unusual house - it's pink and green. Real people build those houses and live in them. They are involved in things like termites, worn carpets, and redecorated bedrooms.

Media people have a psychological inclination, and long training, in seeing as much as possible and getting it down on paper as quickly as possible. Either they never had any inate curiosity about what is really going on, they are not bright enough to comprehend what is really going on, they had those traits, but they have atrophied, or the pressure of finding an "angle" to distinguish their report of an incident from the other media reports of the same incident causes their reports to be without significance to Real People.

During the last election cycle, polls were taken by Media People far, far in advance of the election, or even any primaries. Media People then talked about those poll results. Then they talked to each other on panel shows about what other media people had said about the poll results. This continued through all the stages of the campaign, with attempts to devine the mood of the electorate reaching a higher and higher pitch, until the suspense became almost unbearable by early September.

Meanwhile, a Real Person spent that same time period trying to change the truck delivery system for his product from one involving rental of storage facilities in each town or city, to one involving "just in time" deliveries to save the storage costs, in order to offset the increase in the cost of sugar in his product. In November he started to devote some of his considerable intellectual capacity to the Presidential election, assessed the candidates, saw no significant difference, and voted, as usual, for the nicer looking candidate.

What Media People don't realize about blogging, is that professional reporting media was a temporary phase between the time when the country was founded and the present. When the country was founded, people lived their lives in one place, all of their concerns were local, and they got all the input they needed to do what they needed to do, and to learn all they needed to know, by talking to each other. The professional press was devoted to reporting things of more than local significance. It was expensive to produce and distribute, and it was limited to real significance.

In the present (meaning the twenty-first century) the people actually engaged in real activities can report those activities, and anybody that has an interest in them can read that report.

In the interregnum, a vast enterprise evolved, which utilized increasingly sophisticated technology, to publish things just for the purpose of filling up space, and generating revenue.

Those days are over. Why would we opt for an account of an incident created by a professional reporter, who has no expertise in the matter, and who is only writing about it to earn a paycheck, when we can read a report by the actual participants?

No, Greensboro News and Record I don't think you are going to teach bloggers anything about reporting (or about trust, integrity, authenticity, and freedom from special interests, which newspaper columnist Tim J. McGuire is concerned about).