During 2008, a nerdy baseball statistician by the name of Nate Silver became a sensation in the world of political analysis because of the success of his blog, www.fivethirtyeight. com. (The name was derived from the total number of electoral votes in the United States.) By the time of the 2008 election, the blog was pulling hundreds of thousands of visitors, rivaling the websites of large metropolitan newspapers in terms of traffic.
Silver was in high demand during the frenzied coverage of the election, appearing frequently on many cable news shows. His reputation was cemented when his model predicted the outcome of the election to within 0.1% point in the popular vote; plus, he called 49 of 50 states correctly.
With the election behind us, the blog has continued with its special breed of predictive modeling, now applied to the upcoming midterm elections.
But the evolution of the blog is what is really interesting.
It's now a blog run by the New York Times, with Nate Silver the principle writer. (Silver has long had several other contributors to the blog, and they have joined in the Times venture, but seem to be less visible than they were before.)
The blog has the crisp, fine design that the Times brings to all their blogs, and the editorial standards have improved dramatically. The writing is better, the typos are gone, the flow is smoother. Graphics are more compelling and reflect the superior information design the Times is known for.
The old blog had the rough-around-the-edges feel you frequently see in the blogosphere, and that is largely gone now.
This is what I find fascinating: the evolution of this blog is likely to be typical of what we will see in the future, with established media outlets like the Times taking over the best of the blogging community and standardizing it.
It means that free-form blogging will become more staid, more predictable, and more structured.
This is not all bad. The diffuse nature of the blog world can be very frustrating and confusing. Plus, elevating editorial standards is something to admire, not to bemoan. There is little charm to reading bad, incoherent writing.
For the newspaper industry in particular, it may be another small path to resurrection. Before television, the average large city had several daily newspapers--morning, evening, tabloid, different political persuasions. Readers had choice, and they also got their information from a verbal medium that forced them to be engaged.
Adapting the blog culture gives newspapers a richer dimension. It builds on what they are but adds something important.
We are certainly a little less literate as a culture today than we were in that bygone era. But perhaps a trend that takes the energy of the blog world and focuses into something that is more structured and coherent will make the average person just a little more informed.
Interactive media has already had a dramatic affect on how people learn about and connect with brands, companies, and products. It has elevated the importance of verbal components. The maturation of the blog world may do the same.
Yeah, I think it's hard to see how traditional trade publications can survive much longer in print
Posted by: ed hardy | October 01, 2010 at 04:25 AM