Newspapers’ Challenge

Newspapers have been scrambling to keep up with the world of blogs. In the process they’re actually destroying what sets them apart.

Take this piece from the International Herald Tribune. It’s in this morning’s revamped paper, under the byline of John Doyle—without further affiliation. It’s a good piece, except for a lame ending, but it contains at least four grammatical or spelling errors:

• “the Scotland” twice (“Darren Fletcher was the Scotland’s best player”)
• “England, under am Italian manager”
• “There is a poetry of national longing and a poetic justice being behind the success of the Celtic countries.” Good luck making sense of that.

Now I just put this down to poor subbing. But the problem isn’t that.

The problem is that this piece is actually a blog post. Written by someone who doesn’t work for the NYT/IHT, as far as I can work out. At the bottom of the online version is this:

John Doyle is the TV Columnist for the Globe and Mail in Canada, writes regularly about soccer and his book about soccer, All The Rambling Boys of Pleasure, will be published in 2010.

So, first problem is: does a blog post count as a news article that can be published in a paper as such? And should the reader not be informed that

• it’s a blog post, not a news piece (or analysis)
• and that the author isn’t actually a NYT scribe?

The editing is not good, but it’s actually OK if it were a blog post, because it can be updated. Indeed, the online version has been: It’s longer, it makes sense, and the grammatical and spelling errors have gone. Indeed there’s a correction there that signifies the evolving nature of online writing.

My point is this: I paid for this newspaper. I thought I was paying for something that reflected the best of the IHT/NYT’s stable of writers. I didn’t expect to see the space filled with half-finished blog posts by people who may or may not actually be on the payroll. But I certainly didn’t expect to see the stuff pasted in without any further editing on the part of the IHT staff.

Don’t get me wrong. I still love the paper. And cuts mean that subs don’t have half the time they used to to edit this stuff.

But nevertheless, if newspapers are going to stand any chance at all, they really need to make sure that their material is so, so much better in terms of polish than their online counterparts, otherwise us readers will start to wonder why we’re paying for stuff offline that’s worse than the stuff we read online.