Blog site critiques newspapers
Don Day September 16th, 2007
Crosscut Seattle, the upstart regional news site, goes on the attack against newspapers in Washington and Oregon. As it critiques newspaper sites in the land of Bigfoot, it brings up some great “why are you doing this?” points
- Many of the sites hold back the bulk of their print content until some arbitraliy set deadline. For some papers it is midnight - but in one example, stories from the paper don’t hit the web until noon! (that’s the Eugene Register-Guard if you’re keeping score at home).
- Other sites make you pay to view content if you aren’t a dead-tree subscriber.
- Most newspapers limit one of their greatest assets: photography. You get “postage-stamp” pictures or none at all in many cases.
- Some sites are getting agressive with blogs, but aren’t doing more than posting press releases and little irrelevant nuggets
One online editor, Mark Briggs of the Tacoma News Tribune battled back (Crosscut’s Chuck Taylor chastised Briggs’ paper for posting news late in the morning) - calling Taylor’s reporting “superficial.”
4 Comments Add your own
1. Brink | September 16th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Easy to criticize the work of others, isn’t it?
2. Don Day | September 16th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
I personally think it’s easier to criticize your own work… you usually just don’t do it quite as publicly.
3. Chipman | September 17th, 2007 at 3:54 am
Thanks to the internet, anyone can be a critic. Even if they have no special credentials…or an axe to grind….or just want publicity (hits) for themselves. All they have to do is find other blogs that’ll promote their blog, and presto, instant expert.
Next up: Blogs that rip other blogs and the blogs that critique those ones, too.
4. Safran | September 17th, 2007 at 8:25 pm
Indeed anyone can be a critic, but it hardly took the internet to make that so.
What’s wrong with critiquing someone’s work? It’s up to you if you want to criticize my stuff, and it’s up to me if I want to take your critique to heart. People can rip us, compliment us or whatever - isn’t it really up to me and to other readers to determine for ourselves whether we agree with the criticism?
Just because it’s in print doesn’t make it so. The great thing about the web is that it’s a place for ideas - and you get to decide whether you believe the ideas.
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