Nearly all newspaper websites mistakenly segregate their blogs off with the other blogs. They're organizing by form, not by content. (The Times does a better job, both promoting blog posts on the front page and integrating each blog's content into existing sections.)
And this seems particularly damning:
... most of the blog writers end up screaming into the void. Take internet critic Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune; how will his long piece on internet gossip trash ever get seen? It's total traffic-bait—and it has nary a comment. No entity on the internet has even linked to it, as of 4 p.m. EST today.
You should know that whenever a blogger says "nearly all newspapers" they really mean the ones I read.
ReplyDeleteI just popped by USA Today (blog actually on the front page and blogs linked from section fronts), The Des Moines Register (blogs linked from front page and front page of opinion section), The Washington Post where blogs are organized with columnists and accessible from damn near every page in the site and your own Kansas City Star where all kinds of blogs are accessible from the front page including my favorite Judge's Opinion. If there are readers having trouble finding these blogs, I am surprised they can turn on their computers without help.
Now, I just looked at four papers. Two where I lived, one where I worked and one where I happen to be (at the NCEW convention your company so nicely helped fund), but I am willing to bet that if I looked at another 40 papers, that blogger's contention would continue to fall apart.
My elder journos could do a hell of a lot of things better online, including promoting their blogs and integrating them into the wider blogosphere, but making their blogs to hard to find is nowhere near one of their greatest sins.