NEWS

OK, let's deconstruct a myth. Someone says that weblogs aren't journalism. OK, suppose a journalist has a weblog. When that journalist writes something on the weblog, therefore, it must not be journalism. Suppose the journalist writes exactly the same words on her weblog that she writes in a column in the newspaper she writes for. In one place it's journalism and in the other it's not? Hmmm. OK, try this one out. Are weblogs medicine? Suppose a doctor is writing a weblog and the doctor writes something she learned in medical school. Then the same doctor writes the same text in a medical textbook. I guess it's not medicine when its written in a weblog? You see how silly these arguments are, how easy they are to deconstruct. If there is such a thing as journalism, it must be possible to practice it in a weblog. It's just a format. Nothing more. It's really not a mystery in 2002.

It also goes without saying that if an idiot writes a weblog, then you get idiocy in a weblog.

Study: Newspapers' Web Traffic Exploding

"Major local newspaper Web sites are growing fast -- in many cases, faster than the rest of the Web, according to new findings by comScore Media Metrix....

During May, for instance, unique visitors to the New York Daily News's site grew 23 percent, while NYPost.com and Newsday.com each saw 12 percent growth. At the same time, however, the number of New Yorkers going online grew only 3 percent.

Similarly, unique visitors to Chicago's SunTimes.com increased a staggering 38 percent, while the market's online audience grew only 3 percent as well. Only in Philadelphia, Boston and Dallas-Ft. Worth did local newspapers not experience the same growth trends....

Media Metrix attributed the shifts to growing importance in online classifieds, and to parallel changes in media consumption that sees interactive media playing a role in supplementing traditional TV and newspapers. That's much the same trend touted by groups like the Online Publishers Association, which are encouraging advertisers to buy ads on news and information sites to reach a lucrative at-work audience.

'It's clear that online newspaper sites are rapidly gaining readers -- generally at the expense of print readership,' said Peter Daboll, president of comScore's Media Metrix division. 'Many of these newspaper sites offer a rare opportunity for advertisers to efficiently reach local market audiences that are growing rapidly and spending money more freely.' " [internetnews.com, via The Lost Remote]

Count me in as returning newspaper reader, and I'm definitely one of the folks that make up the above statistic for the Chicago Sun-Times. However in my case, they have NewsIsFree and Radio's news aggregator to thank for my eyeballs. Because the Sun-Times is in my aggregator and the Chicago Tribune isn't, I've effectively switched papers. We still get the Sunday Tribune, but the only parts of it I still occasionally read are the Arts section, Travel section, comics, and ads. For articles, I'm really only reading the Sun-Times these days.