Recently, big print and broadcast media have been paying increasing attention to independent bloggers. They worried that we were stealing their readers. Fortunately, that motivated them to provide blogging opportunities for their own talented writers. As a result, the news business has become livelier and more personal.
As I mentioned in posts earlier this year, key changes in how people get news can be explained away – but they should not be ignored. Consider Alan Mutter’s observation at Reflections of a Newsosaur blog that
While more people than ever may be visiting newspaper websites, they are sticking around less this year than they were in 2007.
That’s the troubling problem the Newspaper Association of America failed to mention this week, when it reported that the number of unique visitors at its members’ websites increased 12.3% to an all-time high of 199.1 million in the first three months of the year.
But an analysis of the first-quarter web traffic reported by the industry association determines that, by most other key measures, the relative popularity of newspaper websites has waned in the last year in spite of the industry’s professed commitment to aggressively building online products and revenues.
Why might readers prefer blogs?
One advantage the blog offers is specialty service. For example, few newspapers can afford to run a column about knitting or fly fishing alone, but a quick search turned up at least dozens of blogs dedicated to knitting. There are also many good fly fishing blogs.
The main advantage of the blog, in other words, is its customization. My three blogs are The Post-Darwinist which covers the intelligent design controversy), The Mindful Hack, which covers fascinating mind-brain questions, and Colliding Universes, which looks at conflicting theories about our universe in the age of the Large Hadron Collider.
If you are not interested in those topics, you needn’t ever visit my blogs. Nor need you pay for a newspaper and then find half a page taken up with my work. If you are interested, I am a specialized source, not a general one. Also, bloggers link to other sources, so you can pursue the story, maybe all over the globe.
Should writers blog?
That’s an individual decision, of course. Not if it distracts us from our work or leads to distressing communications from people with whom we would never otherwise interact. But if all it does is help build a public, well, it is cheaper than sending a paper newsletter to fans. Services such as Google’s Blogger will host a blog for free.
Can writers make money from blogging? Yes, by a number of methods, and I will discuss that in a follow-up post.
© Denyse O’Leary
