News orgs should manage a looser brand
Jeff Jarvis talking about the trouble with newspaper blogs in general, which tend to lack focus. I quite agree with him when he suggests,
So I think that if newspapers are going to blog, they should have lots of blogs at lots of addresses, lots of people creating lots of brands. And this also means that they must be written in the human voice of the person, not the cold voice of the institution. And, while we’re at it, this means that they must join in and link to other conversations; that is they only way they will spread and grow, not because they live six clicks deep into a giant newspaper site.
Although you need some coherence in terms of what you’re talking about and what tone is adopted at the paper, a news org shouldn’t force all its mediums to sound the same. I really like reading blogs from journalists from news orgs that try to express their own opinion, not the companies.
And Jarvis follows up with,
Architecturally, this returns to the idea that news sites shouldn’t be sites at all but larger, looser networks and not just of stuff they make but also — who can afford to make it all — stuff others make. It also points to the problem of presuming that sites can and should still consider themselves destinations.
Sites like aggregators then. Look towards Techmeme, Gawker Media or the GigaOm Network. But can a newspaper, so accustomed to expressing one voice through one medium, easily adapt to becoming multi-medium and multi-opinion? That’s the real challenge facing news site now.
