A predictably useful 'predictive' piece by Neil McIntosh for the revived Press Gazette, a kind of New Year State of the Newspaper Blogosphere riff, with stats on Comment is Free's traffic and inbound links (which are pretty good). The overall argument is that, online, newspapers are moving away from what we might think of journalism, and instead starting/hosting conversations. Here's a lengthy quote:
But let’s not get too smug. For all the success we’ve enjoyed, the fact is blogs are the horseless carriages of social media, when fleet-footed rivals are already cranking out Model Ts. Social news sites such as Digg and Newsvine show how users don’t just want to talk about the news – they’d quite like to decide what it is, or add to it because they happen to be experts in the subject at hand.
Myspace and Islandoo, to name but two, prove that vast communities of interest can spring up around mainstream media content. The conversations, properly nurtured, can end up being bigger – in scope and popularity - than the material that sparked them off. These sites might not be true to the blog boosters' utopian visions of freeing users from the shackles of MSM's narrow focus, but they are hugely popular. People do still want to talk about quite old-fashioned, mass-market entertainment, turns out.
But what of what we do? All this presents a huge challenge, and opportunity, for journalists. It’s difficult for us to accept we might create sites that are only tangentially about our journalism. It’s even harder to admit that, fanned by the viral winds that sweep the net, those conversations might be much more popular than the other things we produce, and start replacing them. We can mutter about the importance of what we do; of trust, and impartiality, and double sourcing and accountability. But the audience's attention is already drifting. Our readers' conversations don't - op-ed columnists beware - even need our initial spark to set the chat off, although if we do well we can still provide it.
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