The necessity of "groupie" blogging
On any given night, during the course of anchoring an hour-long newscast I'll read between 35-40 stories. The variation of the types of reports is noteworthy - most being rehashed press releases, teases of upcoming community events, follow-ups on past reports. Maybe three or four times during the broadcast we'll present a longer investigative piece and perhaps offer but a single editorial. This is how I'm used to presenting diverse information over mainstream media.
One of the things that amazes me isn't the exponential growth rate of the blogging community - it's the way people blog. As a writer and member of the news corps
my blog contained long-form, article-style compositions. Months ago
I was targeted by one of Steve Rubel's flaming arrows, justifiably questioned about a theory I presented in one such piece in which
I predicted the inevitable death of newspapers due to participatory journalism and citizen reporting powered by new media applications. Checking out his post, at the time I thought Steve apparently chronologically listed one- and two-sentence postings linking to other people's work, only offering scant insight. Where's the journalism in that?
I used to loathe on principle these "groupie blogs", a moniker I attached to the segment of the blogosphere where they authors don't really develop any thoughts or theories of their own, merely replicating material based around one or more central themes. No creation, just regurgitation. And the same certainly exists for a certain portion of podcasters, v-loggers, digital photogs, et al.
Already knowing Steve's reputation as a public relations guru (but ignorant to his new media advocacy), I perused
his blog more thoroughly I noted that the guy's work is pretty eclectic - relevant, timely, topical, insightful, useful and interesting. I've since been a permanent subscriber and fan of his work.
And then it hit me: to judge a user's blogging style and behavioral posting patterns by traditional writing standards is unjust. Today's world is all about the quality and timeliness of content, therein laying the true value: this is new age reporting at its best, making for the perfect aggregation of focused content.
So I've since developed a fancy for the shorter-post crowd, dropping the assumedly derogatory "groupie" label and embracing their contributions as an integral part of new media and of the way I receive sensory input. I actually now prefer their quick approach to disseminating information, not being longwinded rants (like the one you're reading now). Theirs are a way to get a quick glance at what happened in the world without saturated opinion or heavy rhetoric. Just an abstract rundown of a topic and a URL - the perfect snapshot for a short-attention span generation. I've even adopted such tactics into my own blogging.
Many of my colleagues haven't been so quick to jump on the bandwagon. Most in mainstream media naively rip and rail on new platforms, refusing to see podcasting and the like as "legitimate forms of communication", whatever the hell that still means. So to legitimize this for MSM hard cases, consider an example: an typical "diversified" groupie blog would contain as many as, say 10, daily posts ranging from quick notes referencing other (perma)links of interest, maybe an opinion-based rant or two, and a couple of brief notes about things happening within peer groups, and perhaps a quick editorial on the state of the world.
Sounds like a pretty decent newscast to me.