Now that Creative Loafing, the corporate parent of many alt-weekly papers around the country, has filed for bankruptcy, the question is, how to keep those papers alive. Apparently, the company's CEO, Ben Eason, has devised this solution: have reporters spend the week blogging about what's out there, then compile the best stories into a print edition.
However, as Gawker points out, "These cities don't need any more bloggers. There are already too many of us! What they need is more original content. Otherwise the bloggers just end up talking about each other, which is the most boring thing in the world." (Link in quote taken from the article.)
A solution is proposed (keep the original content and publish less frequently) that makes a heckuva lotta sense to me. Honestly, blogging is cool and all, but not all of us can be "citizen journalists" and we still need original reportage, right? I'd say we need it now more than ever, with all the belt-tightening and staffing cuts going on at the mainstream daily papers.
And, on the Web 2.0 front, it's come to this--Miss Manners has rendered her verdict on the etiquette of declining "Friend" requests in online social networks. She gives a characteristically droll and sensible response.
No comments:
Post a Comment