Blogging is easy
Although I am not a heavy blogger, I post entries to my blog three or four times a week, I have found it easy to keep it updated. After all, every day I get exposed to situations or news I would like to react to. That is the way most blogs work, we receive information and we like to be able to tell others what we think about it. That is easy, and that is why there are also daily radio and tv talk shows where people express their opinions on what happened a day before. These shows do not require a lot of preparation, participants just listen to or read the facts a couple of minutes in advance and then start talking about the subject. Of course, there are differences, some people know more about a particular subject than others and therefore are able to say more interesting things than others. Like many, I spend some time reading those blogs and sometimes watching TV programs like Crossfire on CNN.
As many of you know, I also publish a podcast, IT Insight. Maintaining that podcast has proved to be much harder. Why? Well, each podcast material is original. I have to select a subject, prepare a presentation and check my facts. That takes time. I have found that I am not able to produce more that one episode a month.
What does that mean for the future of blogs, newspapers and talk shows? There certainly is a market for content that is published in reaction to what other people say or do. However, that market is going to be over crowded since this is something really easy to do. Differentiation will be hard to achieve, but is possible based on subject knowledge and personality which will however inevitably lead to market fragmentation. On the other hand, news consolidation, which is what most newspapers and TV news shows offer today, is less and less valuable as all RSS users know. Finally, news gathering is still crucial as is original content production.
Today, most newspapers survive mainly because of the trust relationship they have established with their readership. However, since most have given up on generating original content, relying instead on syndication to become more profitable, they are finding themselves in the same uncomfortable situation as TV broadcasters who have no control over their content and are finding out that their customers do no longer need them to access it. If newspapers (both physical and online) want to survive they need to get back to the basics, gathering information from the source and producing original content, even if it is expensive. Otherwise, their feature looks bleak.