Everyone’s turning into Smash Hits
Mar 10th, 2008 by handolio
Right, I’ve sussed out this internet thing. We’re all turning into Smash Hits. Bear with me.
A colleague sent me this a while back: a survey of US journalists’ attitude to and engagement with blogs. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but hey, I’ve got time on my hands this morning.
To summarise, the majority of journalists polled felt that blogs have an impact (positive or negative) on the speed and availability of news and, interestingly, also on the tone of the discussion and on their editorial direction.
Writing in different styles for various clients, plus my more technical Shopper stuff, I often find myself thinking about tone. It’s one of the hardest things to nail down on a new project, and some days it’s harder to use one tone than another – there are days when you’d rather be writing up the budget with sensible shoes on than blogging about jet packs like an excited 12-year-old.
I tend to err on the side of formal, and sometimes have to force myself to dumb it down a bit. No offence, like, but I’m finding that blogging helps.
3am atonal
One iCrossing story from last week provides a fair illustration of blogs informing both the story, and the tone in which it’s written. Charlie commented when editing it that it was a bit on the bloggy side, and he’s right, but it seems to work OK.
The story (Jimbo Wales vs Rachel Marsden) was covered in The Register, of course, which seems to delight in sticking the boot into Wikipedia. It’s got a neat line in comedic standfirsts, but the irreverant copy itself reminds me strongly of Smash Hits (R.I.P.) – perhaps it should be called Ver Gister?
Finally, my inner pedant requires me to point out that, in many cases, the US poll actually asked questions about ‘blogs and other forms of social media’, but the write up talks almost exclusively of blogs and, God help them, the blogosphere.
Thinking about it, perhaps that should be Ver Sphere?
