You Know You May Be Blogging Too Much When...

At risk of turning this into one of those silly blogging memes, I just now experienced a moment that would be best told in this form:

You know you may be blogging too much when...

...you're reading a news article on washingtonpost.com, and you wonder why there aren't "Feeling:" and "Listening to:" fields next to the author's byline.

I swear this is a true story.

Anyway, at the risk of overanalyzing things (as I tend to do), this is a nice segue into an entry that I wanted to do that I was going to title, What's Wrong With Online Newspapers?

Last week, there was a Slashdot article discussing an entry by blogger Kirk McElhearn entitled, Why Haven't Online Newspapers Gotten it Right?

It's basically a think piece that doesn't offer any answers, but invites readers to think about how newspapers should adapt for the Web.

Now, this is not a new question. If you thunk back to the early days of the Web, circa 1996, you might recall that the New York Times used to offer their front page as a downloadable PDF file -- basically, it was a big picture of their front page, which you would read on your computer.

(By the way, the Times still kind of does this, although it's not really meant to be used as... anything.)

This is not a very efficient use of the medium. It would be only slightly less silly than broadcasting a picture of the front page onto your television screen.

The rise of blogs has added another dimension to this question. Beyond just thinking about layout and presentation, the conversational nature of blogs has people asking: Why shouldn't journalists blog about their news stories, engage readers directly, and allow comments to be bundled with their stories?

These questions are pretty important to traditional dead-tree newspapers; in fact, you might say it's critical -- there's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth among publishers, because they're worried about declining subscriber numbers.

And so there's been a lot of navel-gazing. For example, the Washington Post has a self-criticism program wherethey pick someone to opine about what they need to do to fix the paper. (The self-flagellation aspect of this seems very Maoist.)

One of the more interesting ones I've heard of came from humor columnist Gene Weingarten back in November. He also used his weekly online chat to solicit reader suggestions for improvements.

Predictably, the full text of his critique made it out to the blogosphere, so check it out. It's focused primarily on the dead-tree edition, but it's still an interesting read on the role of newspapers in modern society.

Anyway, I don't have an ending for this entry, other than to say that all of this still very much transitional, and I don't pretend to have any answers. And, a lot of people smarter than me have been thinking about this kind of stuff ("If Woodward and Bernstein had blogged about Watergate, what would it have looked like?").

So I will just wrap it up here. Thanks -- Joe