Favorite news sites morph into blogs
In the “Star Trek” universe, an alien race known as the Borg assimilates entire civilizations into its collective consciousness.
In the online universe, a publishing format known as the blog is similarly remaking traditional news sites in its own image.
Take my experience with Hollywood Elsewhere proprietor Jeffrey Wells. He’s been one of my favorite film writers since the late ‘90s, when he penned the Showbiz Confidential column for MrShowbiz.com.
Even as he changed online homes, Wells maintained a fairly traditional column format — until he recently launched a blog version with frequent updates and reader comments.
“It’s the coolest thing I’ve done with the site,” Wells said via e-mail. “When I first started with my Mr. Showbiz column the idea was to write two print-style columns per week. Now there are eight to 10 updates/additions/fresh stories per day. You have to get people into the mode of coming back and checking your site out two, three or four times a day. Keep it fluid, keep it moving, keep that traffic up.”
The blog-assimilation trend affects bigger properties as well. AOL is relaunching Netscape.com — a Web dinosaur that still draws more than 10 million visitors a month — as a news service anchored by eight staff bloggers. And TMZ.com, ranked a top entertainment news site by Media Metrix, morphed into a blog this month.
Named for the “thirty-mile zone” around Hollywood that it covers, TMZ also linked three new associated blogs to its main news page. GM Alan Citron said the format enables the site to post more stories in less time while building an interactive user community.
“We want people to have the ability to instantly give us feedback and, maybe even more importantly, interact with each other,” Citron said. “People comment on other comments. It gets conversations going.”
When selecting bloggers, “You look for someone who’s a little edgy, capable of generating a lot of content and well plugged-in to the areas they cover,” Citron added. “There is an endless fascination with celebrity, but there’s also a need to be current. People can almost instinctively sense when you’re not.”
That need for currency has kept David Postman hopping. The chief political reporter for the Seattle Times transformed himself into a blogger last month. State political conventions kept Postman posting to the paper’s Web site every day for the first three weeks.
Although he writes a Friday column for print, “The goal is that a majority of my time is spent online,” Postman said. “It’s all new ground for us. Nobody wants to harm the newspaper, but we’re also trying to create a stronger presence on the Web.”
Editors won’t hesitate to commandeer his biggest exclusives for print, though. “If we’re talking about something we’re sure we have to ourselves and it’s a big story, the blog will not scoop the Seattle Times,” Postman conceded. Some of his posts also are excerpted in the paper.
However the move plays out, it underscores the increasing stock newspapers are placing in their online products. And shifting into the blogosphere makes particularly good sense for Postman because “politics is one of the things people like to read about online,” he noted.
Beyond the immediacy of the format and the stylistic freedom it affords, Postman said he enjoys fostering debate in the comment fields.
“There’s an addictive piece to this,” he said. “You want to see what comments have been posted and see what people are saying on other sites. It can stretch the day out a lot.”
But don’t ask him to give up that Friday column. “I have to stay in the paper,” Postman said. “I want to keep a little piece of that going.”
As the Borg would say: Assimilation incomplete.