Blog brings human face to big-city murder
For about an hour it got top billing on CNN's website (for those who don't visit, CNN.com runs major headlines at the top of it's site, with one article in particular highlighted in a box with a picture).
I think this article indicates some advantages blogs offer over print news, while its featured status on CNN.com and its integration into a major local newspaper (a major traditional news website) alludes to the mainstreaming of the blog into popular consumption of reports on current events.
The article discusses The Homicide Report, a blog published online by the LATimes. The blog itself reports on all homicides in LA County... a task that the constraints of print media would make impossible.
Like most big-city newspapers, the one Leovy works for -- The Los Angeles Times -- reports only the most "newsworthy" cases. But those killings, elementary school drive-bys and celebrity murders only account for 10 percent of the county's homicides, Leovy found.
She wanted to go deeper, to put a human face on the toll homicide was taking, particularly in L.A.'s black and Latino communities.
"The Web offered what the paper did not: unlimited space," Leovy wrote in a front-page story summarizing her year as creator and the first blogger for The Homicide Report.
The article notes that the impact of this comprehensive reporting style is markedly different (and more democratic) than the pick and choose what sells nature of traditional reporting... in this way blogs capture the long tail of news stories that would otherwise go unpublished. Furthermore, the comprehensive nature of the data collection has other advantages... for example, "The Homicide Report tries to answer questions such as, "Are there fewer homicides when it rains?" (Maybe). It also includes the names of suspects shot to death by police."
It seems possible that the integration of the blogs into the online face of mainstream news media has several advantages. For one, it allows major news providers a way to grow and compete in the online space (it seems encouraging that such companies are investing in bolstering their online content rather than making their web front a carbon copy of their print media). Additionally, an unlimited web space does not imply that all information is created equal, and as we have seen it can be hard for consumers to sift through the multitudes of blogs in order to extract the most accurate, relevant, and high quality information. By marrying the brand equity and reliability of major news sources with the limitless blog domain, it seems that the giants of print media may be able to leverage their name into more eyeballs on their blogs.
However, it should also be noted that this blog is published by a paid LA Times reporter, and for the news media to truly compete, they need to find a way to allow their blogs to grow organically, without maintaining a paid staff of bloggers. But with the obvious willingness of citizen journalists to blog, and the value of incorporation into a branded news streams, such a task does not seem impossible.
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