Why doesn’t Traditional Media incorporate Internet content properly?
Published September 7th, 2005 in E-PRThe art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order - Alfred North Whitehead
In a recent post Joseph Jaffe raises the point that traditional media’s coverage of things happening on the Internet only talks about them, rather than truly incorporating them into their content.
If you find a great site, you don’t email your friends about it and not provide a link, that would be absurd. So what’s so different about a newspaper column that discusses what’s hot on the Internet this week? It prints the link, but if you go to the media organisation’s website there is nothing there that links to it.
The stupidest example of this is the Sunday Tribune’s Blogosphere column which keeps track of Irish bloggers. Even if they have identified the Social Media phenomenon, do they realistically expect someone to type out the sometimes never ending web address of a blogger? Fingers crossed that the Tribune will actually start to offer some content on their site soon, I spotted that it’s undergoing maintenance.
I know whoever the big cheeses are in the media are thinking ‘Why would we get people to come to our site and then redirect them somewhere else?’ If it works for sites like Gizmodo and Boing Boing then why won’t it work for the Irish Times or the Irish Independent? Oh that’s right, because their websites are rubbish. Like I’m going to register for your site when I can get the same news from RTE.
To be honest though the worst offenders are online media that don’t link…or better yet, don’t have Webfeeds/RSS. I recently read a story on a leading Irish technology website that mentioned another site, but didn’t link to it despite its features being part of the discussion.
It’s a mad, mad world!
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Irish Independent, Irish Times, Piaras Kelly, RTE, Social Media, Sunday Tribune, Traditional Media
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i think the guardian does a pretty good job. they give urls to their own site and to external sites. they’ll often even do a tiny url on the external url.
i don’t think any of the irish media - and i’ll include the the times and rte in that - actually understand the web, or try to utilise it. as for the likes of the turbine and village magazine, who just go for brochureware sites - it’d make you want to cry.
joe bloggs could solve the problem by simply starting his own blog and posting the col there sometime after the paper has run it.
“The stupidest example of this is the Sunday Tribune’s”
A year or two back the Turbine decided to go down the road of only having only a ‘digital edition’ – ie the newspaper exactly as it appears in print. Doing this along side a good or excellent website like ThePost.ie or GuardianUnlimited.com is ok. What the Turbine did was just plain silly. But personally I don’t care ever since the paper has just about turned into the Sunday Indo 2.
As I’m posting in different places far too often - most of the Indo, and the It, are online (daily) on eircom.net for free, without any need to log in etc
Not all the content is though, there’s nothing worse then using the Irish Times website it’s like Russian Roulette - what’s free and what’s not. I have an account through work, but if I see breaking news I’ll go straight to RTE instead..
I think all news websites should be forced to study the BBC.co.uk to see how it should be done.
Just a question to FMK, you say that Joe blogs could post the article in there blog, surely copyright would be an issue there?