Near Total Domination by Traditional Media

Near Total Domination by Traditional Media

A recent study suggests that traditional news media, like the Chicago Tribune, do not have to worry much (yet) about Gaper's Block and other "blogs" diminishing their power as primary sources for news.

For a recent study on this topic, see: http://www.freepress.net/docs/local_chicago_websites_study.pdf

Note that although this study is focused on "hard news," rather than "soft news" (food criticism), and on blogs rather than social networks, it does bear on the place of LTHForum in the larger media cosmos.

Interesting - I found this link a few weeks ago but didn't think to extrapolate it to food sites. I only found it because apparently they just searched through ChicagoBloggers.com and picked a few of the semi-often-updated sites through there. I also saw that they used my own personal site in the study, which I'm sad to say rates only in the "N/A" category for hits & ranking.

Yeah, it wasn't the most professional survey. They used Alexa numbers, which are unreliable at best (do <em>you</em> know anyone who uses the Alexa browser bar? me neither).

But it's interesting to see that the Trib views us all as competition.

me3dia wrote:But it's interesting to see that the Trib views us all as competition.

Kind of, but their claim that blogs are serious competition was self-serving: as I interpret the situation, they wanted to leverage that claim to invest more widely in properties that would have been previously off-limits.

Kind of, but their claim that blogs are serious competition was self-serving: as I interpret the situation, they wanted to leverage that claim to invest more widely in properties that would have been previously off-limits.

Oh, that's exactly what they were doing. But the fact that they even thought they could get away with it shows just how far blogs have come in the past couple years. Back when Gapers Block started, blogs were still being defined, and traditional media didn't have anything to say about them except to laugh at the poor plebes playing with their online diaries.

David Hammond wrote:
Kind of, but their claim that blogs are serious competition was self-serving: as I interpret the situation, they wanted to leverage that claim to invest more widely in properties that would have been previously off-limits.

Interesting. Blogs are becoming more and more visible now. Just the fact that someone has done this survey means that they are paying more attention to blogs.

I don't think that anyone has mentioned that the Chicago Tribune cited eatchicago.net as one of the sites that competes with them in their argument for relaxing media ownership rules!

Actually, this is a subject I think about quite a bit, and I don't think that the impact of sites like LTH impacting food coverage is really in the same class of issue as objective-reporting news. It's a lot more rewarding to eat and cook and talk about it with like-minded folks than it is to do serious investigative reporting or even substantial fact-gathering on the topics the study classifies as "hard news."

(That's not at all to say that what happens here isn't interesting in a media-impact sense. Just a substantially different area, even if this study also lumped them together.)

germuska wrote:I don't think that the impact of sites like LTH impacting food coverage is really in the same class of issue as objective-reporting news.

Many of the news-based blogs referenced in the study were found to link to major new sources because those major news sources have the resources to dig up data about political goings-on, police activity, transit negotiations, etc. Bloggers focused upon in this study frequently simply reflect and process information gathered by someone else (e.g., The Tribune) -- there's value in that, of course, but LTHForum is different.

First off, LTHForum is not a blog -- it's a series of wide-ranging discussions among very many people. Second, and because of that first point, we have even more boots-on-ground resources (every poster here) than the major news sources (e.g., television, radio or print publications), so LTH is in a position to provide deeper and broader and more up-to-date coverage of our niche (food) than major news sources could possibly do. That's not to say we're as easy to use, perhaps, just that we "report" more detailed news and views about more places than any large traditional media publication could possibly do, given the resources they have.

germuska wrote:I don't think that anyone has mentioned that the Chicago Tribune cited eatchicago.net as one of the sites that competes with them in their argument for relaxing media ownership rules!

And they're so current!

David Hammond wrote:First off, LTHForum is not a blog -- it's a series of wide-ranging discussions among very many people.

For as much as I sometimes think online social networking is maturing, it really is probably more in the learning to walk phase rather than entering adolescence. The fact that there is still such a poor vocabulary for differentiating varying activities (posting on a discussion board, blogging) is evidence of this.

In Jonathan Gold's article on Jitlada Thai (among many articles), I believe he referred to Chicago blogger Erik M. What an odd descriptor, I thought. But then I couldn't come up with a better shorthand whose meaning would be as widely understood.

I've been involved in this community long enough that online discussion forums are a fact of life for me, but I continue to be surprised by what a misunderstood pasttime it is.

Aaron Deacon wrote:I've been involved in this community long enough that online discussion forums are a fact of life for me, but I continue to be surprised by what a misunderstood pasttime it is.

"Blog" is a funny-sounding, media-friendly term (kind of like "Chowhound") that people glom onto as a generic descriptor for all kinds of online activity. Frankly, I'm not so crazy about "chat site," either.

Gold should really have know better -- but you know, you can't believe everything you read in the newspaper.

Well, I don't know that I'd take anything in a legal brief as representing anybody's real view of the world, and this one certainly defines what the media do in the way that is most favorable to what newspapers do (do you realize that virtually no blogs run human interest photos of kids and puppies playing in sprinklers on hot summer days? That Jumble, That Scrambled Word Game does not appear on any blogs at all? How will democracy survive?)

Newspapers will probably get out of the paper business (and retro-Americans such as myself will be very sorry) but it is unlikely that they will get out of the news business because bloggers have taken it over. What we already see is that they are covering things differently because we're out here... already covering things differently. Mass media will likely always be bigger (though it's important to caveat that; people who are convinced Fox News secretly runs America are always taken aback to learn just how few people watch it-- about 1 in 500 Americans each day-- and there's already a handful of blogs that do better) because, hey, they're mass media, but the big distinction is coming to be between mass media aimed at the great mass which is only marginally interested in a subject-- politics, food, whatever-- or niche media aimed at the niche who are much more interested in the same things. And influence and spending will often prove to be on that side-- political junkies pick our candidates, movie blog readers give Oscar buzz to hot movies that haven't even opened yet, and LTHers drive attention to restaurants. This will be a different world from the past, and one that supports the contention that the old media ownership rules just aren't as important as they used to be, but it's not an either-or-- that the Tribune food section will go away tomorrow and everyone will turn to us, any more than NBC closed up shop when HBO was started.

Andrew Huff of Gaper's Block, as well as other bloggers, on "Chicago, Tonight" earlier this week:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAE5HBS6p5U