David Galbraith reckons the distinction between blogs and newspapers has blurred and cites Talking Points Memo as an example. It’s an interesting theory but I’m not completely convinced. I wonder how easy it is to post those News Headlines to TPM – can’t be as easy as whacking some text into a WordPress or Blogger box. Strikes me TPM is a newspaper site rather than blog and that the former are becoming more like blogs rather than the other way around. But I accept the distinction is fuzzy, but then it always has been. (RSS evolved from a news syndication model after all). I guess I’m just a bit protectionist now everybody and their dog is claiming to be a blogger without ticking all the fundamental boxes of blogging, but I guess I should try and define what those boxes are. I suspect I might fail.
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About this site
In June 2000 I started blogging at peteashton.com and 10 years later in June 2010 I decided to stop. Blogging here, that is. I started a clean slate over on I Am Pete Ashton and maintain all manner of other web presences which are all listed here along with my contact details.
You probably came here via a Google search or from following a link on some old blog post somewhere. I hope what you find is useful in some way, though do check the publication date - it might be rather old now.
Thanks for your eyeballs.
Pete Ashton
Is the point that TPM has *become* more or less indistinguishable from a newspaper site now? It used to at least look like a blog until a few days ago :)
However, when it started it *looked* as much like a blog as anything else way back then (though I think the archives must have been migrated to moveable type from something else)?
I think it was began originally as a one man band by someone angry at the Florida fiasco in 2000, and then just grew… Mind you, even though the site was his own, he was a published journalist already at that point, so he may have thought of it as a convenient platform for traditional journalism. The site certainly seems to pride itself on scoops and scalps, which seem more a mark of old-school journos?
I should have made it clear that I had no knowledge of TPM prior to this, but coming to them fresh is possibly quite illuminating – regardless of its heritage it looks like a newspaper site to me now and I’d treat it as such. (Or at least it did when Galbraith first linked to it – it’s looks more like a blog today.)
What I don’t want to get into here is that old mainstream media vs blogging debate because I think it’s futile. But, as a medium, there are certain things which are unique to blogging and one of them, I think, is the simplicity of the form. The only restriction I have on this site is that the width is 500 pixels. Though there are stylistic confines that I place upon myself too.
It’s terribly complicated and as such I don’t want to define myself into a corner, though I suspect that’s inevitable. But there are certain sites that fundamentally and patently are not blogs but they call themselves “bloggers”. This, I feel, is not helpful if those sites are complicated looking. Or at least they’re not helpful to me in my blogging evangelism role.
I feel that corner lurking…
And this is also a debate I’m having with myself regarding the new Custard Factory site. Is it a blog or a newspaper or both or neither or something else? I suspect it’ll tell me what it is over time.
I’m pretty sure that until fairly recently TPM was using regular blogging software, and I suspect that it may work like the Huffington Post or Kottke.org, where the front page is an overlay on top of a bunch of blogs spliced together.
Gawker are planning to continue along the strict one column blog style but with heterogeneous content such as polls, thumbnails and videos spliced in, whereas a site Like Treehugger is starting to look more like a newspaper.
Treehugger has a WordPress backend, whereas Gawker sites will actually be free of their dependency on and Blogging software (currently MoveableType is still used for some things) within the next few weeks.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is that nowadays you sometimes can’t tell whether a site is built using blogging software or some other type of content management system, which seems like a fairly objective way of demonstrating that the categorization of the end product is also blurred.
There is something fundamental about reverse chronological lists online, but there is also something fundamental about multi-column traditional newspaper design. They both have things to offer online.
Hmm. I think I’m looking at this from more of a cultural perspective (which is why it’s all terribly subjective), that while there will be grey areas where they merge and while it might be very hard to pin down there is a quite distinctive style and/or attitude to Blogging, just as there is a style to newspaper-esque writing.
That said, these accepted norms will shift across different blogospheres.
I’m edging into that corner again…
As for the software involved, I’ve built sites using MT’s template tags that look nothing like blogs – they were just using it as a standard CMS. Interesting that Gawker are moving away from MT though.