Blogging: Entrepreneurship Trumping Central Planning

When David and I started together at the National Post at the paper’s launch in 1998, both of us approached our job in roughly the same way. In the morning, we would check in with a supervising editor, discuss topics and word count, and then settle on an assignment. We'd work through the day, researching as we went, and send in our copy by deadline (usually in the early evening). The next working day, we'd start the whole process over again. It was a true daily grind.

Even when newspapers started putting their articles online in the late 1990s, the daily grind didn't change much: You'd file in the same way, and on the same schedule; it's just that readers had two ways to access the article the next day instead of one.

Nor did most journalists change their routines much when blogs first became popular in the early part of this decade. Blogs were for amateurs. Real journalists stuck to deadline.

That changed when we all started realizing that 99.99% of blogs were of no interest whatsoever -- and the other 0.01% tended to be written by -- surprise, surprise -- professional writers. Newspaper editors began bugging their writers to produce blogs on the side, engaging readers with extra details and insights that didn't make it into the "real" stories.

In time, some newspaper writers became regular bloggers, with their best content being "reverse-published" in the print edition. The line between the two media became fluid to the point that now, in 2009, many newspaper columnists, editorial writers and feature writers -- including me -- are hybrid workers, repeatedly going back and forth from blog to conventional deadline journalism during the course of a day.

This existential shift in the nature of news and opinion journalism hasn't really been studied much. As noted above, we have been so obsessed with the transformation of news outlets that we haven't noticed the profound changes we've imposed on the humans who staff them.

The extent of the change can be measured (if only crudely) by sheer word count. When I began in this business a decade ago, I would crank out 500-800 words and go home. These days, I sometimes post 500 words on the National Post blog before I even leave for work. By the end of the day, I might blog more, as well as produce an article for the print edition. In a given week, it's not uncommon for my colleagues and I to produce 5,000, or even 10,000, words apiece.

Putting aside the issue of quality (I'm not going to pretend everything I put on the blog, or even most of it, is up to the same standard as my triple-checked print articles) -- I ask you the question: What other industry has seen such a productivity increase in the last five years?

But productivity isn't even the most interesting part of the transformation: The whole generations-old linear workflow arrangement of journalism has been upended.

By "linear," I mean the flow of articles from writer to deputy editor to section editor to copy editor to proof-reader to production editor to printing press to reader. I still follow a scaled-down version of that routine when it comes to the print edition. But in the case of the in-house blog, I upload my musings directly - straight from my fingertips to readers' screens. And amazingly, it all goes up under the National Post brand - notwithstanding the possibility that I might have unwittingly included libel, factual errors, obscenity or something else that might embarrass or even compromise the newspaper. It's the equivalent of Procter & Gamble letting its workers stuff their experimental, homemade toothpaste concoctions into plastic tubes and ship it out with a P&G logo. Thousands of journalist-bloggers are doing this very thing across the world right now - a situation that is at once liberating (for the writer) and terrifying (for the brand owner).

When senior editors give a writer the keys to an in-house blog, they not only lose ex ante editing control, they also lose control of his subject matter. By their nature, bloggers aren't like beat reporters, whose assignments come from their bosses, who in turn get their marching orders in daily news meetings. Blogging is an exercise in quick-reflex reactivity: Good bloggers tend to get their posts up within hours, or even minutes, of breaking news - not enough time for decisions to be run through newspapers' normal editorial chain of command.

This means that an in-house blogger is, by his very nature, essentially autonomous and self-directed - even if he works for a traditional, top-heavy, seniority-driven news outlet. In some cases that I've observed, it's not even clear whom he reports to - and misunderstandings arise between online staff and section editors about what to do when corrections or revisions are needed.

Where things get truly complicated is when the same journalist has overlapping responsibilities for the print edition and an in-house blog - a common phenomenon now that newsrooms are laying people off and forcing survivors to justify their worth by combining roles. In the old days, a journalist who stumbled across an interesting topic at breakfast might have had to wait hours to pitch it to an editor, and then wait some more before getting a thumbs-up or -down decision. Now, a hybrid blogger-columnist has to make his most important decision instantly and privately: Does he blog the item? Or pitch it as a column? Or should he do both - the blog as a quick hit, and then develop it into a print article to pitch to an editor later in the day? Or perhaps a blog sandwich - blog-column-blog, with the follow-up blog post oriented toward highlighting interesting reader feedback and rebutting critics.

Usually, I've found, blogging first is the best strategy. Putting up a rapid blog post is a great way to gauge whether you're onto a good subject (when the comments pile up quickly, you know you're onto something) and flush out sources that help you produce a more thorough piece for the next day's print edition. It also helps a writer avoid the lazy instinct that has him put off a writing project till just before deadline. Competition drives your fingers over the keyboard: The longer you take, the greater the chance some other blogger will beat you to the same point. (That's one of the reasons that - by my observation - adding blog responsibilities to a print journalist's job description actually serves to *increase* his or her print productivity. Instead of fussing all day over a single story in between trips to Starbucks, the writing process is driven forward by overlapping waves of urgent blog-driven fury.)

In other words, hybrid journalists aren't just required to be their own editors. They're also required to be their own *meta* editors, deciding interwoven questions of medium, timing, content and word count on their own initiative, hours before they subject their actual words to another human being for conventional editing.

There is no existing professional model to guide any of this. All of it is new ground - especially for authoritative, risk-averse media outlets that have developed their reputation for accuracy by layering editors upon editors and following rigid algorithmic workflow processes set down in manuals and worker-training programs. Suddenly, much of the show is being run by entrepreneurial, quasi-autonomous content providers choosing their own subjects and medium.

Hmmm . Entrepreneurship trumping central planning? I knew I'd find a way to bring this thing around to NewMajority's conservative mandate.