Your Brain on Facebook and Why Blogging is Going by the Wayside

Our ADD culture now shuns corporate blogging, favoring less time-consuming Facebook postings and that’s a shame. Paralysis by no analysis.

At 138 characters, the above opening to this piece would work as an effective tweet. It would also work as a brief Facebook shout out. Talk about the irony in blogging about how corporate blogging is going by the wayside.

Last month, USA Today reported that businesses who blog fell to 37% in 2011, down from 50% in 2010. The reason most commonly given for the blog blackout: blogging takes too much effort and (it does, I should know!), it’s not where customers are – they’re on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. 

So to answer my own question that frames this blog post – Facebook and Twitter aren’t killing bloggers.

Our need for instant gratification, insane levels of information overloaded, and our anywhere and everywhere mobile connected lifestyle is.

It’s incredulous to think of blogging as an antiquated medium already. But at the speed at which technology changes these days, it’s easy to see the blog as barely a step above traditional email. Just another thing to read, to add to the burdensome pile of daily to-dos…

Like I said, blogging does take effort. More than just aggregating other’s works or simply “curating,” successful blogging takes aggregation one step further, providing analysis and commentary – two functions that come right from the world of traditional print media. To a large extent, blogging takes the best of old school media and combines it with the zero production costs of web publishing and the ethic of instant and transparent content updating.

Does that mean every company should blog? No. It doesn’t. But for the ones that do, modern blogging should be viewed as an essential compliment to the faster and shorter paced world of Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr. Consider these mediums as “headline grabbers,” or teasers – ways to hook and link your audience back to your company’s website.

Considering that ThinkInk is among the 37% of companies that maintains their blog as both commentary and reaction to the ever-changing world of communications, our bias is unavoidable. And I’ll readily concede that blogging, tweeting and Facebook posting can all exist as un-tethered mediums, serving their own benefits. In fact, with brevity as the backdrop to this blog post, the 138-character opener served as an effective way to condense, trim and consolidate my thoughts, making for clean, crisp writing.

But sometimes, even in our mobile-enable, digital-frenzied world, people need to sit down, read a long newspaper article (in whatever medium) digest complicated, thought-provoking material and let the revelations that those works generate percolate and permeate their neurons.

Corporate blogging is hard work. So is going to the gym.

Brains, like our bodies, need constant workouts for them to remain in top shape and a steady diet of only social media probably isn’t the best for either.

Now was this 466-word article so damn hard to read? 

Is Journalism As We Know It Becoming Obsolete?

Not yet. But a few prayers couldn’t hurt.

Last week Gigaom.com blogger Matthew Ingram resurrected the decade-old question: is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete? His answer – after a nearly 900-word build up:

No. “I would rather say it as evolving and expanding — and I happen to believe that’s a good thing,” he writes.

Pardon the bluntness, but to me that doesn’t read like a satisfying conclusion. The cells in my stomach are evolving, dividing one by one, millisecond by millisecond, year by year. My stomach expands with each new meal I consume. But without a little help from digestion and peristalsis to keep that expansion in check or DNA coding to prevent runaway “cell evolution,” my body would grow sick and unable to function.

If left unchecked I’d land in the Morgue – the place where humans – and newspapers ultimately retire.

To conclude that today’s twitter-centric and blog-frenzied journalism is “evolving and expanding” isn’t good enough. Chalking the process up to the cyclical “rise and fall” of newspapers and bloggers doesn’t cut it either. A more nuanced question is: how is journalism expanding and evolving and what safeguards, if any, are working to ensure its healthy growth?

Ingram rightly points out that journalism is about: “a spirit of inquiry, of curiosity, of wanting to make sense of things.” He’s also correct when he references programming scholar Dave Winter’s suggestion that in today’s world, with often zero mass publishing barriers, anyone can do it.

But the fact that “anyone can do it” doesn’t mean that everyone can do it equally well. Possessing a spirit of enquiry, of curiosity, and of wanting to make sense of things are platitudes that can be applied to almost any profession.

Eighteenth and 19^th century journalism, wrought with hyper opinion, political party dominance, and a healthy dose of sensationalism effectively blurred the lines of hard news, soft news, and what today would be called “infotainment.” Not until the middle and latter 20^th century did a more separation of church and state-like thinking transform journalism into today’s polished and professional product.

It’s not that today’s citizen journalists, CNN’s iReporters or Arab Spring bloggers are bad. It’s just that too often their skills are unrefined.

To be sure, gathering facts, observing breaking news, and collecting what else has been written on a topic – termed aggregating on the web – is the first step toward quality journalism. But placing that information into a compelling and concise narrative with context and fact-checked sources is where the professional differences lie. A world where citizen journalists, bloggers, and traditional reporters remember they’re playing on the same team, in equal numbers would be the best way to ensure that the hard fought professional standards achievements of the 20^th century and the internet mass publishing miracles of the 21^st work in concert, not in chaos.

In the last decade, as newspapers and other print formats struggle to engineer the magic bullet of profitable web publishing, thousands of professional journalists have left the profession entirely, jumping ship for the perceived safer and often better-paying waters of public relations, corporate communications and government outreach.

An industry losing its institutional knowledge is an industry in danger of losing itself.

Is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete?

Only if we let it.