The truth about blogs

Communications News, Feb, 2008 by Ken Anderberg

We have two blogs on the Communications News Web site, one that I write and one penned by Associate Editor Denise DiRamio. Mine is used more to run ideas by site visitors, gain some insight from those readers and create a dialog. Denise's is more utilitarian, covering an area important to our visitors that is not covered editorially-trade shows that IT decision makers attend.

A few years ago, hers would have been called "Trade Show Report" or something similar and would have been treated as news material. Now, it's called a blog.

These blogs just don't happen on their own. Denise and I have to find time in our already busy schedules to provide regular content for our blogs. We thought it was important in this day of "engaging readers online."

But how important are our blogs?

Surprisingly, we have a significant number of people viewing our blogs. Unfortunately, we don't know what they think, because, like the vast majority of blogs I've seen, visitors rarely provide comments. I've noticed this problem is not unique to ours. Virtually all the blogs I've seen in the past year have the same reader comment traffic--virtually none.

I'm not talking about political blogs, here; everyone has an opinion on that subject and is more than happy to share it. Trade magazine blogs, however, even with experts writing them, generally do not generate more than a few comments

So are these blogs actually engaging visitors?

Then there are the other problems: A prolific and popular blogger for

a California newspaper was found to be plagiarizing her content word for word from print publications and online resources. Companies are using blogs to denigrate competitors and their products, without supporting evidence.

Straightforward, thoroughly researched blogs often are considered boring. Rumor-centric blogs are apparently far more interesting. Content that used to be product reviews is now packaged as blogs. The lawyers are getting into the act, as libel claims related to blogs grow.

For some reason, many people seem to think that the information they read in a blog is accurate and researched by the blogger. The truth is that a great many bloggers would be helpless if they didn't have real journalists writing articles that they could comment on or steal from.

"If I were the king of journalism, I'd force newspapers to stop publishing for a month," says Patrick Williams, managing editor of the Dallas Observer. "Then let's see what would happen to blogs. Facts have to be the basis of opinion at some point. And if a blogger is collecting facts, then at what point does the publication cease being a blog and become an Internet news site?"

Ken Anderberg

kanderberg@comnews.com