Mark Cuban wrote Thursday about why he thinks that newspapers, and the New York Times in particular, are making a mistake by publishing blogs.
One of Mark’s main points is that blogs are so associated with hasty rumor-mongering and blowhard pontificating that no newspaper should be involved with the form. “A blog is a blog is a blog is a blog,” he writes.
My take is different. I’d say that blog is the name of a format for information and opinion that is roughly analogous to “column” or “newsletter.” The format itself doesn’t tell you whether the content is pedestrian or inflammatory, impressionistic or deeply researched.
At the Times, our standards for fairness and reporting are the same for our blogs as for everything else we do. Sometimes bloggers work quickly. But that’s no different than decades ago when some articles were written in the minutes before the presses started to roll. Many posts, depending on which of the more than 50 Times blogs you are reading, are more casual and more analytical than typical news articles. But the paper has always had columns, reviews, first-person features and all the other forms of writing that appear on blogs.
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I think we’ve also learned that blogs can be a great extension to articles reported initially for the newspaper. Reporters are finding they can use Bits to add additional information and open up discussions that flow from their reporting.