The lecture series You are the Power: The Impact of Web 2.0 couldn’t have come at a better time for me. As a journalism and an art history student and just after this lecture series ended, Highway Africa, one of the biggest journalism conferences in Africa, happened in Grahamstown. The theme for this year’s conference was “Reporting Africa 2010: Development and Democracy” and the key focus was on information and communication technologies (ICTs). Therefore an interesting parallel was drawn between my two subjects: their future and how the Web can help to advance them.
Because of the parallel that was drawn between these two subjects, I decided to focus my essay on newspapers and how blogging can work to enhance them and allow them to reach a bigger audience. For both subjects, blogging allows readers/followers to critically engage with the content being presented to them and with each other. They create new platforms on which to view work and readers can comment on other people’s blogs or create their own platform on which to express their views. Blogs make use of the Web technology known as Web 2.0. This refers to web based on communities that allows its viewers to interact with one another and change the content that is found on the website. In other words, people can own and control the data/media that is on the site.
While the internet is proving to be a threat to the traditional print media, it is helping the art world to grow and become more accessible to the general public rather than keeping it as an elitist subject. The print world has had to adopt New Media into its vocabulary because of the dying nature of print and blogs are one key component to doing this. Nearly all newspapers now days have a blogging outlet for its readers. This means that readers can comment on the daily articles, contribute to the newspaper or read what is going on electronically and thus, you don’t have to be situated in the same area as a newspaper that you would like to read just as you no longer have to have access to a specific gallery if you would like to see a specific work of art.
I chose well known South African, African and international newspapers that have blogging sections to them, namely South Africa’s The Mail & Guardian, Kenya’s The Standard and The USA’s The New York Times. I thought that it would be interesting to see how different countries/continents handled the same concept of blogging and how successful/unsuccessful I find each of their blogs by examining their content, contributors and the user-friendliness of the blogs.
In my opinion, The Mail and Guardian blog – Thought Leader – is extremely successful. The website is easy to navigate and there is a lot of content on it. Thought Leader makes use of opinion and analysis by M&G writers, contributors and by anyone who has interesting, intellectual things to say. Anyone can become a blogger on this site however, people are screened therefore one cannot automatically become one. The site is screened by the M&G editorial team, therefore all of the content is of an extremely high standard. Well known people from the media and other walks of life are bloggers for M&G. Some of these names include Rhodes’ own Guy Berger, head of the School of Journalism, the artist Anthea Buys and politician Patricia de Lille.
Thought Leader breaks its content down well for the reader. There are tabs for the days featured posts, most read and comments. One can also view the different blog entries through specific searches like looking at the most popular entries, the contributors from A-Z, subjects from A-Z or by subject (art, media, sport etc.). While the tone of writing on these blogs is academic, it is not over the readers head and therefore almost anyone can read and enjoy the entries. As there are so many contributors (at least 100), readers can find at least one if not more bloggers that they can identify with or who’s ideas they like or wish to keep track of.
Kenya’s newspaper The Standard has a page that you can visit that has blogs on it, however I feel that it needs a bit more work until it is up to the same standard as Thought Leader. The Standard is not very user friendly at all. Once you have clicked on the ‘blog’ tab at the top of the website, you reach a page that only has five links on it. There are only four regular contributors to the blog, three work for the newspaper namely Rose Nzioka, Kipkirui K'Telwa and Stephen Ndegwa, and the final blog is the Editor's Choice.
The blogs are not broken down into topics or any other sorting mechanism besides who wrote them. One cannot view previous blog entries unless you click on the person’ name and a list of their previous blogs pops up on the side. While most blogs have a little blurb about the person writing it, The Standard’s blog does not. Beyond telling the reader what the person’s position is within the newspaper, there is no more information. While this extra information is not crucial, it is nice for readers to try and connect or find some common interest with the writer themselves.
With all of these criticisms being noted, one must compliment them on the excellent quality and high standard of the blog entries. While they mostly deal with content from the newspaper, they are thought provoking, interesting and they challenge the reader. They are not simply comments on the stories but analysis and intellectual opinions. Although the blog is not very user-friendly, once you get used to it the content makes up for it.
I was expecting great things from The New York Times blog however I was sold short. While there are a lot of different beats covered (arts beat, at war, media decoder…), they are seemingly jumbled and it is hard to search through them for an article that you are interested in because they aren’t listed in any particular order like with Thought Leader. However, under each section are a number of different articles written by multiple authors. These are interesting because they’re all varying lengths and there are often a few that cover the same topic by different contributors which allows for different opinions and analysis. This means that one doesn’t have to trawl through countless blogs to find a few that are on the same topic, they can simply click on the topic they’re after and there will be different views presented to them.
Each blogger does not necessarily write a new entry every day however there are always at least a couple of new entries on varying topics. The New York Times blog has an extremely wide base of topics, some to do with news content and others that are just for fun. The second critique that I have of the blog is if you click on the wrong article that isn’t linked to the blog then it will take you to another section of the website for example, World news. When you click on ‘blog’ on the home page, a new window or tab does not open up but the homepage changes to the blog page. This shows that the blogs are not a separate website as with thought leader but are simply an extension of the site. They do not have their own identity that they can stand on such as a quirkly little name or a catch phrase.
No comments:
Post a Comment