Newspapers vs. Blogs

As a Brit, I can't help but notice that there are many American trends that seem to make their way across the pond and begin to influence our culture; films (or movies!), music, fashion, the list is endless. And I'm beginning to worry that their trends in journalism will start to develop over here as well.

The reason that this bothers me is because it's recently been found that a quarter of American newspaper journalists plan to quit their jobs! Roy Greenslade points this out on the Guardian's blog, saying that among the biggest reasons for this were "low salaries, long and undesirable hours, and stress".

But I've got a suspicion that there's more to it than that. They are, after all, newspaper journalists, and it appears that this aspect of journalism is suffering somewhat, following consumers' increasing use of the Internet as their source of news rather than more traditional print formats.

This argument could be developed further to consider that in fact, blogs are one of the best sources of news, particularly when information is required frequent and fast.

Robert Niles supports this, claiming that: "The blog is the ideal format to deliver information in a breaking news situation. There's no reason to continue relying on traditional newspaper narrative formats online when editors could better serve their readers with the far more online-friendly blog format".

This suggests that newspapers are no longer the preferred way of accessing news. But Mindy McAdams has come up with a list of situations when print editions work for her. These include when she is on a long train journey, or when newspapers are delivered to her in hotel rooms. In other words, when she has no other choice!

So maybe the print editions which do work best are the free press; the ones that people don't have to choose or seek, but that just appear at their doorstep for them to leisurely browse through when the adverts come on the TV.

McAdams would probably consider this a worthy argument, as she concluded that "In my current lifestyle, the printed newspaper just does not fit".

Finally, I'd like to take a look at a survey used on Kaye Sweetster's blog. She regularly uses her blog to discuss advancements in the journalism industry, and considers how journalists can make the most out of online resources.

Here, she mentions a survey which revealed that 54% of business journalists interviewed admitted to using blogs for story ideas, and that 72% were using blogs "with varying attributions".

Surprisingly, only 2% said they "would never report on stories starting from a blog", which goes back to Niles's argument that blogs are perhaps the best source of information, for consumers and journalists alike!