Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The New York Times has said it is planning to shut down or absorb as many as half of its existing blogs, with the hope that those skills can become more widespread inside the newspaper as a whole — but will they?

The “we need to have something on this” impulse leads to the worst (professional) writing on the web. We all learn this anew each time some poor 20-something content producer writes some exceptionally dumb take, and everyone spends a few hours piling on the outlet that published it. But the attention-grabbing Offensive Takes only obscure the fact that all the inoffensive takes – the ephemeral, aggregated, feather-light blog posts telling people who already know that something happened that something happened, produced solely in the hopes that the post will, through luck and a bit of dark magic, win the Facebook algorithm lottery – are the most depressing pieces of writing on the web, for the reader and the writer.

The Internet media is exploitative and unkind to its greenest employees. Most of the Takes are written by 20-somethings making a (comparative) pittance. The Take is barely, if at all, edited. The young Take-producer is given no time to learn to report, or to read anything other than Everyone Else’s Takes. Dozens of aspiring journalists now have clips files that consist of hundreds of these awful aggregated units of completely disposable Content. Here’s 80 words on something James Franco did. Here’s 100 words on ISIS. This is my link to a Daily Mail story about long-lost twins who married each other....

A round up of all the best insights from the live Q&A, which explored how alternative news sites platforms interact with mainstream news sites... The internet has enabled the proliferation of alternative news sites, such as blogs and community news platforms, providing consumers with a variety of perspectives. In our recent live Q&A, we explored what role these news platforms play in breaking news and how far they impact mainstream news reporting. Here is a selection of views from our recent live Q&A looking at the relationship between alternative news platforms and mainstream news sites.... Great insight... more local, more video, more activism, more news...