Jeff Jarvis is president and creative director of Advance.net, which oversees the Internet operations for Advance Publications, including CondéNet and Advance Internet. He is a former television critic for TV Guide and People, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday editor of the New York Daily News and columnist with the San Francisco Examiner. He also runs a popular blog called BuzzMachine. Can't say I agree with everything he's written, but he's an influencer, if you know what I mean. He was interviewed in March 2003 by Patrick Phillips for the (terrific, if you're in the craft) Web site I Want Media. Some excerpts:
[IWM]: How does adding a blog benefit the Web site of a traditional media company, such as a daily newspaper?
[Jarvis]: Anything that serves the reader with more information is good for us. Period. We must be the place to start to find out what's happening in your world, and Weblogs are an inexpensive, efficient and very useful means of doing that.
[IWM]: Could the blogs carried on your newspapers' sites potentially weaken your papers' brands as authoritative original news sources?
[Jarvis]: No. These Weblogs are separate from the newspaper content and even the newspaper brand, just as our forums and chats are. It's just more content. Readers are very clear, I think, that Weblogs are not the product of a large news-gathering operation with vast editing capabilities; Webloggers are individuals having a content-conversation with readers.
[IWM]: A recent Reuters story on blogs quotes a blogger who says that Weblogs “restore power to individuals with something to say.” Isn't that the antithesis of traditional media?
[Jarvis]: It's not the antithesis. It's the future. My own rallying cry is that the Internet is the first medium owned by the audience and, yes, that means that this medium gives them a voice. The wise media entity — newspaper, magazine, radio or TV station — will use it to listen to that audience, to find out what they care about and what matters to them and what they have to say. This creates a new and powerful relationship with the audience.
Here's a piece which examines how some magazines are using blogs.
And Now, For A Little Bloggery
There are lonely teenagers cyber-begging for attention. There are passionate and articulate experts sharing their insights. There are outright lunatics. These are the residents of the blogosphere, an online realm ruled by the egalitarian ideal of an individual communicating without the filter of established media.
Lately, however, established media have glommed on to blogging. Magazines as diverse as Variety, Christianity Today, Business 2.0, The New Republic and The American Prospect are sponsoring their own blogs, committing editing time, money, prominent space on their Websites and their journalistic reputations to a format that was supposed to be all about amateurs controlling the microphone. . ..
Many media critics are calling for news organizations to get behind blogging. Blogger Leonard Witt writes about this in a piece called Citizens Can Improve Your Media Company:
Don’t throw it away, recycle all information:
- Today an editor or a reporter gets a press release, he or she reads it quickly and either uses it as a source, culls some information from it or most often tosses it. But guess what, there actually might be readers who find it interesting. Find a category for it and post the release as is.
- o Check all information that passes through the newsroom, ask if it could be repackaged or just simply indexed or categorized and displayed for anyone who wants to tap into it. With bloggers and other amplification vehicles it might receive wide notice.
- o Community newspapers have established yes editors whose job it is to see yes to anyone who wants to get something in the newspaper. That makes people happy. That’s what we are doing here. More yeses, less no’s mean a lot of happy people and more information for your readers.