Dan Gillmor‘s We the Media arrived in the mail today — ah, the lovely sound of organized atoms hitting the carpet. This got me thinking about the artificiality of “articles” as a rhetorical form for newspapers. They are a result of a scarcity that no longer exists. Reporters often have beats they cover, producing articles when something happens of sufficient importance to warrant taking over some of the limited real estate of the newspaper. Online, there’s no scarcity of real estate, so we can publish more than the occasional article. In fact, blogs are more like beats than like articles. They provide context and continuity, as well as voice.

A quick google reveals that Matt Welch said this a year ago in the Columbia Journalism Review (and I’m sure there are prior attributions as well because on the Internet, everything has already been said once):

Beat reporting is a natural fit for a blog — reporters can collect standing links to sites of interest, dribble out stories and anecdotes that don’t necessarily belong in the paper, and attract a specific like-minded readership. One of the best such sites going is the recently created California Insider blog by the Sacramento Bee’s excellent political columnist, Daniel Weintraub, who has been covering the state’s wacky recall news like a blanket. Blogs also make sense for opinion publications, such as the National Review, The American Prospect, and my employer, Reason, all of which have lively sites.

Yup.

New journalism: The presentation of the world through the lens of a life. New bloggy journalism: The discovery of the world through unending conversation.

Categories: Uncategorized dw