The Daily Show’s prodding of mainstream media’s attempt to get hip to the blogosphere is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. Absolutely brilliant. And dead-on.

The CNN Inside Politics feature where two young, attractive women sit at their laptops dueling pianos-style and read blogs is about as apt an example of how slow they’ve been to understand blogs as you’ll find. Well, except for Newsweek.

Newsweek now features a “Blogwatch” section (where this blog was mentioned a couple of weeks ago, albeit not entirely accurately). Except the magazine doesn’t actually print what bloggers have written. It merely posts the URLs of blogs debating some “hot” issue, with about ten words hinting at what the debate’s actually about. That kind of thing works on an actual blog, where you can click on the URLs and read the posts. I’d like to think I’m stating the obvious here, but actual magazines aren’t clickable. So you get this bizarre feature where Newsweek makes what reads like a blog post in its magazine, but that of course has no blog functionality.

Here’s my advice to magazines, networks and other traditional media outlets looking to tap the blog trend: Talk to, use, and publish actual bloggers. Crazy idea, eh?

If you’re a producer, and something a blogger has written strikes you as provocative, book him to talk about or debate to the post on your show. So, CNN, instead of bringing two attractive, clueless “blog readers” on to simulate the reading of blogs on-camera, ask the bloggers themselves if they’d like to come on to discuss what they’re writing about.

If you’re an editor and want to feature blog stuff in your magazine or newspaper, why not ask the actual blogger to write something for you, or for permsission to run the post in your magazine (perhaps a magazine-appropriate version that doesn’t rely on hyperlinks).

So, Newsweek, instead of mischaracterizing my post about Powerline and In the Agora, for example, you could have run the actual post, which would probably have been more interesting — and certainly been more accurate — then a short synopsis that only makes sense if you can click through the hyperlinks.

Of course, I’ve been called part of the clueless old media that doesn’t understand blogs too, so maybe my advice isn’t worth much.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 at 9:29 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.