BusinessWeek’s Stephen Baker has some excellent recent posts that let us into the inner workings of how professional media work, and even a preview of the mergence of journalism and blogging.
For the Jan. 23, 2006, issue he authored the cover story, “Math Will Rock Your World.”
His first post talked about how his blogging style crept into his journalism style.
I think blogging strongly influenced the development of the story. When it came time to write, I wanted to write it in a looser more conversational style, like the blog. What’s more, I wanted to be clear with readers from the very start that I knew very little about math, that I was an outsider visiting this world. That sort of disclosure is much more common in blogs. In traditional journalism, by contrast, we usually write as though we know what’s going from the start.
Somewhere I read recently a predication that blogging would be dominated by journalists. I think that’s correct. Like journalism and other products and services, if a blog is lacking in quality and value — however readers define it — no one will read it. The quality and value of blogs will increase as more and more journalists blog — and adopt the tone and even individualistic spirit of blogging.
At the same time, the conversational tone and openness you see in blogs will move into professional, or main stream journalist writing. This is true even for broadcast journalism as podcasts grow in popularity.
Baker also had a couple posts — here and here — in answer to questions and comments about why he didn’t blog about the story while he was researching and writing it. (Baker’s were the result of a post and some comments at BuzzMachine.)
If you want to know about the planning and process behind story development in professional journalism, Baker gives some excellent insight. The jist: It’s about competition. While opening up the story to others for collaboration, it also would’ve opened it up to BW’s competitors.
You wouldn’t ask an engineer to blog about an important new product he or she is developing, would you? (Hopefully not.) So, don’t ask a journalist to tell his or her competitors what’s in the next issue.
– Mike
Technorati tags: journalism, BusinessWeek
