Blogged

Blogs at the Post-Dispatch: Good, or bad, or what?

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then…they copy you? Where weblogs are concerned, the newspaper industry has decided it’s better to incorporate than to attempt to extirpate. Blogs are increasingly in at newspapers these days, but what to make of that? Old wine in new bottles, a new form of media, or just a marketing tool for an industry in need of better numbers? To the point: are the dailies actually doing a good job at blogging?

NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen thinks a lot about newspapers, and about blogs, and the shifting ground where the twain meet. Along with his merry band of undergrads at PressThink’s Blue Plate Special, he’s compiled a list of what they judge to be the top American blogging newspapers among the 100 largest by circulation. They settle for six top papers and a couple of interesting honorable mentions, all worth a look. My concern, though, lies with a paper that didn’t make that upper ranking - my own town’s daily, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The P-D has put a fair amount of effort into the internal blogging business. So how’s it doing? With the Blue Plate Special study results as a touchstone, I rendered a quick assessment of my own. I’m no journo, of course, just an interested reader. But still…

Rosen’s Blue Platers described their methodology for judging newspaper blogs, and I certainly think it’s valid. I relied on it as I judged the P-D’s blogging effort in three broad categories: the look, the content, and the voice.

The look: Blogs at the Post-Dispatch labor under a heavy burden in this category, because the overall layout of this newspaper’s website is (for reasons we’ve discussed before) flat awful. The blog pages, including the blog homepage, are at least not as cramped as the rest of the site, but the empty look here is rather lifeless. Insofar as a blog’s appearance should communicate a sense of individual personality, the blog presentation here is distressingly bland and anonymous; not very inviting. Entry excerpts and the blog titles give you an idea of each blog’s topic, which is not as straightforward as you’d like to see on the homepage (the highly-ranked blog site of the Washington Post is worse in this regard), though at least there are descriptions to be found on the blog pages themselves. Compare this to the homepage of the Blue Platers‘ top-ranked site, the Houston Chronicle. Chron.com also provides something basic and necessary: a capsule definition of just what blogs are. Hard to believe as it may be, not everyone knows what blogs are.

The content: This quote from another Blue Plate Special article provides a guiding principle:

One theory says: never blog about the things the newspaper normally writes about. Only blog about the stuff the paper never writes about. Follow that rule and your blogs won’t suck.

Even if you don’t completely buy into that philosophy, it still makes sense that a newspaper blog provide a value-added service and give the reader something not to be found in the “straight news” to be found elsewhere - otherwise, what’s the point in having a blog at all? I think the P-D does somewhat better in this regard, in a couple of corners - I look at such examples as Jo Mannies’ Political Fix or even the vaguely annoying “$20″ where-to-go-out-and-booze-up blogs. (The P-D seems to rely rather heavily on these “entertainment” blogs, a pitch to the hard-partying younger set.) Other blogs, however, seem to be little more than reader comment dumps. Not an unworthy service in of itself, but isn’t that why the paper also hosts bulletin board forums? Bloggers at the P-D seem to have a fairly short leash when it comes to content; nobody’s wandering far off the range.

The voice: Harder to define, perhaps, but you know it when you hear it. A sense of personal, even idiosyncratic style that stands apart from the gray-plated tone of basic reportage. There is not much of that to be found in the P-D blogs as a whole, and you wonder if it has as much to do with a conservative newspaper culture as it does with the individual writer/blogger. Set aside Jeff Gordon’s Tipsheet (which, as far as voice goes, was a blog here before there were blogs here, if you follow) and you get the idea that any one of these weblogs could have been written by any other blogger on the newspaper staff and you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference. In comparison to the no-holds-barred environment of the larger Web, the Post-Dispatch blogosphere is a pretty tame place. You might expect that at any institutional weblog, but even a quick comparison to other newspaper efforts such as this one, this one, this one, and this one (The P-D is missing a bet here - we in St. Louis love to talk about weather!) shows that there’s a vast spectrum of voice waiting to be explored.

There’s another aspect that’s well worth our time - the relationship between papers and the outside blogging community. That’s a topic for another day, except to say that so far as I can tell the P-D doesn’t have such a relationship…except with regard to the funny and talented Dana Loesch…except that this blogger’s work is presented as a column, not a blog.

That may tell us something. Or not.

In any event, that’s our look for now at the Post-Dispatch, a paper with a toe in the ocean of blogging, not yet committed to taking the real plunge. Many newspapers, even most of them, are in the same situation. We’ll just have to wait and see if the P-D decides the water’s fine. In the meantime, the tide rolls on.

Note: This topic updated further upstream in Serendipity, sort of: New blog at the Post-Dispatch.

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