25 Jun 2014
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4 thoughts about news site blogs after The Lede’s demise

Posted in Online Journalism By John Kroll On June 25, 2014
Just because The Lede is deleted doesn't mean other sites should kill their blogs.

Just because The Lede is deleted doesn’t mean other sites should kill their blogs.

The New York Times is shuttering its The Lede blog, and an editor told Poynter that in time, about half of the site’s current blogs will vanish. The Times cites several reasons, including:

  • Little traffic to the main pages of individual blogs; most came from social sharing or the site’s home page.
  • Little traffic at all to some blogs.
  • The work required to keep blogs active.

And there’s this:

“I’m actually a believer for the most part that we don’t need to be naming things,” [Managing Editor Ian] Fisher said. “I think at this point readers are way more sophisticated than we give them credit for.” In other words, they don’t need a flashing neon sign.

At The Plain Dealer, all our content was put online via blog software (Movable Type). But we only had a few of what I called “bloggy blogs” — places where the authors used a more conversational tone and pushed out content that was not mainly intended for print. Even among those few, lifespans were short. For SEO purposes and sheer inertia, some of them lived on in name long after they had stopped reading like true blogs. Even so, I believe there’s a place for blogs on news sites. In no particular order, my thoughts:

Tone: If you’re running a traditional newspaper site, with almost all your content still reading like print articles, labelling content areas as “blogs” can remove some (but not all) reader resistance to what you’re presenting. When the content on cleveland.com began to include more blog-like stuff — shorter posts, snark, aggregations — we endured some grief in the comments.

I ran a blog called Cleveland Remembers, focusing on local nostalgia and obscure history. When headlines about this stuff starting showing up on our homepage, we got the usual “why is this news?” feedback. You will get that, regardless of what you do, from some trolls. But using the Cleveland Remembers label and restricting it to similar items — rather than throwing it on anything that was about the past — got the message across to most readers.

Branding: Fisher says that “for the most part,” the Times doesn’t need to put flashing neon signs on its content. But its site design does allow it to give special notice to columnists. There’s a reason newspapers run logos with columns in print, and it’s not just to designate them as opinion. Readers seek out specific columnists and will read them regardless of the day’s topic. When you’re considering starting or continuing a blog on your site, ask yourself if it will provide that kind of hook.

Direct traffic: I’m not surprised that most blogs on the Times site get little direct traffic. While I was working with cleveland.com, our direct traffic mostly flowed through the home page, the main sports page and the main Browns page. Although sports columnist Terry Pluto is very popular, even for him readers generally came through those pages or via search or social media. But we knew that if readers could tell that a link went to a Pluto column, they were far more likely to click than if his identity was hidden.

The more active a blog is, the more likely its main page will be popular. While Pluto is a prolific writer, his content mostly flowed in a predictable pattern — for example, several posts during and after games — and was always prominently featured on other pages throughout the site for extended periods. On the other hand, I’ve bookmarked Eric Zorn’s Change of Subject blog at the Chicago Tribune site because he posts frequent, short items that don’t always get home page love.

Even if a blog’s home page doesn’t get much traffic, it can be useful as a place to package related material and a lure for searches.

Lifespans: It’s normal for blogs — hosted on other sites, or on their own — to die. It’s a part of the ecosystem of blogging. They die for many reasons: Because the one person driving the blog got bored, or busy, or reassigned. (Blogs hosted at major sites can outlive their originators, of course — but only if the institution has a commitment to them.) Because the topic lost its currency. Or even because the site itself became more blog-like. The current iteration of cleveland.com, for example, puts an even greater emphasis on short, frequent posts than we did a few years ago.

Fisher was right; blogs, done right, take a lot of time. I faded out of Cleveland Remembers when I got busy with my regular duties. However, I don’t regret having started it. Because, as Jay Rosen tweeted today: