The Guardian Still Thinks Blogs Are Crap

In his weekly column, Victor Keegan of the Guardian upholds the view that newspapers will win the battle of news. Here are some extracts from his column and a little reaction from us:

A journal in which all content is judged by readers runs the danger of making the Sun look distinctively upmarket.

Anyone who monitors Digg knows this is not the case - anyone seen a headline like “Jess May Get New Boobs” on Digg recently? Because of the idea of community, there’s an unwritten understanding of how to behave. And if you step over the mark, the community soon lets you know about it.

The survival of newspapers will depend on how quickly they absorb new technologies. Services such as Google News need newspapers because without them they would have nothing to recycle. This raises a paradox: the more successful they are, the less successful they will be because they will kill the golden goose that has been feeding them.

Firstly, this ignores the truth that the Guardian itself is an aggregator. Yes, there are columns and some original reporting - but there’s a heck of a lot of aggregation too from press releases and news feeds. With the vast access of news available to us from different sites via RSS - us, the readers, know this.

Secondly, this assumes that Google or a news-community will always be sourcing content from mainstream newspapers. We wrote before about the digital opportunities to bypass the major news gathering organisations and go directly to the source instead.

Thirdly, this suggest that the Guardian has the funds and time to become a quasi-software company.

Blogs and sites such as Digg are more dangerous because they generate their own views and have a different notion of what news is. But, just as Old Media crushed the upstart Eddie Shah’s hi-tech newspaper, Today, 20 years ago by adopting the technology themselves, so they can do the same with the social websites. Newspapers may yet turn out to have a comparative advantage in becoming “trusted sites” at a time when an explosion of blogs not only makes it impossible to read even the best of them regularly but also to decide what is true.

OK - So Victor has never used RSS nor understands the dynamics behind OhMyNews.

The need to be the first blog on the block to spread a bit of regurgitated news, complete with your own spin, isn’t obviously a way to become a trusted brand.

Scoble, Engadget, Techcrunch, PSFK(!) - to name but a few. People are turning to blogs before they turn to the news. Remember how Chris Anderson used the power of the blog-mob to work out which news was important?

Speed is the enemy of depth. Newspapers still have a vital role in generating trusted content. Whether it then appears on printed paper, on a portable screen, on a website complete with video (making it converge with television) or a mobile device (where the potential has only been scratched) remains to be seen. At least newspapers, unlike the music industry, aren’t trying to deny that a revolution is taking place.

Actually, newspapers are in an even worse position than the music industry! At least with the music industry, you have to have the talent to make music to participate. With journalism, quite frankly, 14 million think they have a talent to write. 14 million people!

What we’re not saying is that the folksonomy is a perfect replacement for newspapers - but we are reacting to the naivety of mainstream media. They seem to have a rather enflated view of their worth - and that differs from the view of the readers. That attitude means that The Guardian continues to tell us how in control they really are. But to us, The Guardian seems to be sitting on the beach like King Cnut, waiting to turn back the waves.

Guardian Unlimited Technology | Technology | Can a crowd really edit our daily paper?

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