In many ways, the Internet is becoming akin to cable television: There’s plenty of content, but little substance. Faced with more competition, the future of blogs remains a mystery unless it can work out these kinks.
As the number of blogs continues to escalate, quality is drowned out by an inundation of unremarkable and gimmicky writing.
An article in U.S. News and World Report titled “12 Ways Blogging Increases Your Job Prospects” cites a Blog Pulse statistic that claims there are 168 million blogs on the Internet, a number that grows by the minute.
In a perfect world, the increased content would create a more competitive environment that would in turn foster and reward quality over quantity. But it hasn’t worked out that way, at least not yet.
Instead, media consumers find a hostile, cut-throat atmosphere that rewards immediacy over more thoughtful, reasoned discourse.
Ironically, it’s this same immediacy that saturates the Web with reactionary analysis that brought blogs to prominence.
Before the rise of the blog, daily newspapers reported on news that was often ‘a day late and a dollar short.’
The advantage of blogs was that they provided news and commentary in real time.
Popular blogger Andrew Sullivan, in an essay for The Atlantic titled “Why I Blog,” acknowledges this change, though he deems it an advantage rather than a hindrance.
“We bloggers have scant opportunity to collect our thoughts, to wait until events have settled and a clear pattern emerges,” Sullivan wrote. “And with that level of timeliness, the provisionality of every word is even more pressing — and the risk of error or the thrill of prescience that much greater.”
Therein lies the problem.
To blog is to instantly react to the most up-to-date news, but how can someone write with any sort of perspective five minutes after an event?
More often than not, the reactionary analysis must be polarizing in order to attract attention.
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Aside from a few outlets, one being ProPublica.org, traditional reporting is left to the titans of old media such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, while blogs take small reports out of a paper and provide “analysis.”
This creates a lot of unoriginal, redundant content.
Visit the DailyKos.com, a left-leaning blog site, and you’ll find an array of rants about President Obama’s most recent blunder or his most recent accomplishment. The same can be said of right-leaning websites such as RedState.com or the DailyCaller.com.
In a sense, the incentives for bloggers are messed up. The medium, as it exists today, rewards sensational headlines and search-engine-optimized hypertext.
Because the content is unoriginal, the majority of bloggers resort to using sensational headlines designed to increase the number of page views for their site, thereby increasing their profit generated through advertising.
Whether someone hangs around to read the entirety of the post is irrelevant, because page views are all that matter. A company won’t pay to advertise on a blog if no one is reading it.
Why worry about getting your facts straight when all you need to do is write a headline like “Obama holds secret meeting with terrorists” and receive 100-fold hits?
This results in fewer meaningful stories.
Long-form and investigative journalism have very few online outlets where commentary reigns. One reason is that it’s expensive to do both kinds, but also that the Internet fuels our cultural ADHD.
We want things immediately and succinctly. Throughout their brief history, blog posts seem to get smaller, with less reporting and more linking to other blogs to explain complex ideas. In an article titled “The End of Blogging,” New York Observer reporter Dan Durray interviews Marc Ambinder, a reporter for The National Journal, about blogging.
Ambinder said that the current state of blogging makes it increasingly difficult for writers to carve out names for themselves.
“You’re competitive in terms of getting something first, and then you’re competitive on getting a take that is close to the truth so much as it can be approximated, and then you’re competitive in building and keeping an influential and broad-based readership,” Ambinder said.
And as other social media sites such as Twitter become more prolific, blogs are competing with even shorter and quicker bits of information, which can mean the future of blogging will reinvent itself in the face of stark competition, or it’ll ramp up its previous efforts, and which really seems more likely?
