Lessons for Bloggers vis-a-vis Financial Journalism

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Posted on May 6, 2010 by Chris Lau Posted as Past Post Archives

Image Source: techcrunch.com

The idea of staying relevant was touched upon in the discussion of Project Management in relation to Enterprise Architecture Management.

In blogging, maintaining relevance in a place where attention always moves elsewhere first has everything to do with  reputation. Your reputation is earned by your words you say and how reliable they are.

While attention deficit disorder rules the day via “say it in 140 characters or less” – twitter – we all witnessed during this blog contest  that even Twitter had to sell Ads to pay the bills. Twitter adapted its business model.

Much like twitter, we, the blogger, need to adapt our blogging style and channel, whilst maintaining credibility.

So, I ask you, dear reader, to spend 74 minutes of your time for this video entitled Online News: The Frontier of Financial Journalism.

In this video, the journalists from FT.com (Financial Times) and bloggers discuss the deteriorating business trends in traditional newspapers. This is in contrast to the growth and popularity of blogs.

The issue at hand is that the blog-content business model does not work. What does work is for journalists and newspapers to use blogs as a gateway for potential customers:

Give customers a preview with free content, but if they want more, make them pay for it.

The discussion is rich with information. Ultimately, in the news room, it will be concluded that content creation comes from those who can offer insight and who have the ability to synthesize information quickly.

Conversely, in the blogosphere, anyone can create a blog in minutes. Most will not last. Those who eventually lose their credibility will fade too.

In the blogosphere, content creation is easy and quick, but the key ingredient to maintaining credibility is to fact-check. Here is where blogs can have an advantage.

After all, your readers are your fact checkers when they comment on your blog.

TechCrunch is an example of a site that grew quickly. Engadget is another.

On a lighter side of things, this TED video is a how-to guide in how to be a top video, should you become a speaker for TED.com.

We in IT– most especially those who participated in this contest – can learn from the role blogging plays in the business of financial journalism. First, we can learn how to promote a product or service via blogs and via traditional advertising.  Second, our audience is our gateway to developing a better blog.

They may even be our next customers (they can even be our competitors – which brings up that other rule of being skeptical).

Finally, their visits increase the value of your blog, bringing up the possibility that your blog site may one day be purchased.

To read more articles posted on Blogging Idol, view the author page.

Chris Lau Chris Lau (80 Posts)


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  • Don Sheppard

    Do you think we had much of an audience? there weren’t a lot of comments posted!

  • http://twitter.com/chrispycrunch Chris Lau

    Blogs are notorious in having few comments posted. It’s usually 0.5% of total page views.

    If you look at the stats, the contest generated more page views than contests of the past.

    Part of the reason could be the traffic brought in by the contestants this year.

  • http://whyhire.me/ron_van_holst Ron Van Holst

    Interesting video, lots of good points, but to be honest I did not listen to it all the way through. I’ll explain in a minute, first I’d like to comment on a point.

    I agree with Chris in that there is a lot that can be learned from a panel discussion like this. I find even more interesting the statistic that comments only represent 0.5% of total page views (I wonder what the ratio is to some who read the whole blog post, but that is harder to measure). One panelist on the video said that commenters are non-representative of the population of readers, although the panelists did not seem to agree on this point. A statistical sample of a population has to be random, commenters are self-selecting, thus not random, thus can not be representative of the general reader population. I would suggest here by extension that bloggers are not representative of the population of internet users either. Although the internet is becoming more participatory, blogging is completely different than commenting on a friends picture in facebook.

    I think internet content should be brief. There is a time and place for a long and detailed analysis. For the type of people who like to blog, the 140 character limit is learning a new discipline, but it is also a lesson of what works on the internet. Before the internet, we would spend a few hours reading our favourite paper or magazine. We had a smaller set of higher quality information sources. We got 3 channels over the rabbit ears, so choosing a show to watch was pretty easy. Now we have an almost infinite source of information, more easily available than ever before, and with the ability to participate to a level we have never seen before. The banter at the local farmers market of a 100 years ago has been replaced by a global conversation. Hundreds of voices have been replaced with billions. I get hundreds of new items in my google reader each day, and these are all based on criteria that I have selected. I cannot read it all, I cannot even skim it all. Thus with too many sources of information, even info in our scope of interest, the information has to be short and to the point.

    Most of the information is garbage, and we don’t even have time in most cases to qualify the content. That is the power of social networks, we qualify based on the source, people we trust. For unknown sources I will quickly skim for some useful information. For sources I trust, I will take the time (when I make the time) to take it all in.