Links are good
One popular view among blogs and online media in general is that the traditional newspaper is going the way of the dodo.
A decade ago, so the reasoning goes, almost all readers of news had to rely on their local papers.
But now, the explosion of online media, most recently blogs, has meant that you can get news and commentary from anywhere, at any time.
Sure you might check your local paper for the game scores or the latest local scandal, but if you want news from, say, Darfur, you're not going to turn to wacogazetteherald.com for the latest.
The inevitable decline in readership and loyalty is supposed to make it very tough for local newspapers to survive.
But I think there might be more to it than that.
A big thing blogs have done is provide commentary on reporting by the mainstream media. Of course there is the fact-checking of asses and the occassional original reporting. But the reason-to-be (as the French say) for many blogs is to point out and comment on interesting or flawed articles from various newspapers and publications.
And what do blogs do when they comment? They link.
So it struck me that maybe blogs will end up helping traditional media by boosting traffic and providing more eyeballs to view online ads. I mean, I would never have any reason to vist the Rocky Mountain Herald's Web site on my own. But if I see a link and pithy comments on Instapundit, or even Sex's blog, I will.
Anyway, I was having these thoughts a few days ago but sort of let them slide because I didn't really have the energy to follow them up.
Then I see this piece on Clive Thomspon's insanely excellent Collision Detection where someone has come up with a metric -- "links per thousand copies of circulation" -- to measure a publication's online influence.
The examples given are The Wall Street Journal, which hides all its content behind a subscription wall, and The Christian Science Monitor, which has a tiny paper circulation but offers its content online for free.
The result is that CSM is one of the most-linked to papers, while the WSJ is among the lowest.
As Clive says:
A decade ago, so the reasoning goes, almost all readers of news had to rely on their local papers.
But now, the explosion of online media, most recently blogs, has meant that you can get news and commentary from anywhere, at any time.
Sure you might check your local paper for the game scores or the latest local scandal, but if you want news from, say, Darfur, you're not going to turn to wacogazetteherald.com for the latest.
The inevitable decline in readership and loyalty is supposed to make it very tough for local newspapers to survive.
But I think there might be more to it than that.
A big thing blogs have done is provide commentary on reporting by the mainstream media. Of course there is the fact-checking of asses and the occassional original reporting. But the reason-to-be (as the French say) for many blogs is to point out and comment on interesting or flawed articles from various newspapers and publications.
And what do blogs do when they comment? They link.
So it struck me that maybe blogs will end up helping traditional media by boosting traffic and providing more eyeballs to view online ads. I mean, I would never have any reason to vist the Rocky Mountain Herald's Web site on my own. But if I see a link and pithy comments on Instapundit, or even Sex's blog, I will.
Anyway, I was having these thoughts a few days ago but sort of let them slide because I didn't really have the energy to follow them up.
Then I see this piece on Clive Thomspon's insanely excellent Collision Detection where someone has come up with a metric -- "links per thousand copies of circulation" -- to measure a publication's online influence.
The examples given are The Wall Street Journal, which hides all its content behind a subscription wall, and The Christian Science Monitor, which has a tiny paper circulation but offers its content online for free.
The result is that CSM is one of the most-linked to papers, while the WSJ is among the lowest.
As Clive says:
I love it -- the Journal's rating is 337 times smaller than the Monitor's! Of course, there's no doubt that the Journal is still a much more influential paper, though given these numbers, I wouldn't be surprised if its closed-down gamble eventually blows up in its face. If online advertising continues to grow, the Monitor could wind becoming unduly profitable for its size, while the Journal goes in precisely the opposite direction.This kind of fleshes out my hunch that blogs and links will turn out to actually be good for smaller newspapers.
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