Blogging, rapid web publishing and citizen journalism has given greater freedom and power to online users. But has this revolution harmed the quality of what we read? Chris Wright investigates.

Chris Wright is a information architect at cScape

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to read much of the IT press these days without coming across an article about Twitter, how it’s going to save the world, and how it isn’t. I don’t want to add to that discussion here (except maybe I already have) but its soaring popularity got me thinking about how easy it is to get one’s voice heard on the web these days. Twitter is a special case – technically it’s micro-blogging – and it is typically used to provide short updates on what people are doing there and then. But it is a form of blogging, micro or not, and it is blogging in general I think I have a problem with. Wikipedia defines a blog as “A type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.” A blog can be further defined by its extremely low barrier to entry. Prior to blogging it was perfectly possible to set up a website and publish you own content, but it wasn’t always that easy. At worst coding skills were required, at best an in-depth knowledge of one of the many web authoring tools was needed to get a site up and running and looking professional. Blogs played a significant role in changing this. Outfits like Blogger and WordPress went further than offering free webspace or cheap hosting. They offered ready-made templates, advanced CMS functionality, and a range of web 2.0 features. Suddenly anyone could create a site for free, and update it with ease. Not only could anyone create a blog, but so many people have. WordPress has over 200,000 active blogs on its books, with over 50,000,000 words being published a day. That is just a drop in the ocean. The total number of blogs is difficult to calculate but tens of millions isn’t a fantasy figure. Add in the number of Twitter posts and these numbers swell even further.

So it seems blogs have opened the floodgates, allowing almost anyone to create and publish whatever they desire, whenever they desire. There are blogs out there covering every topic under the Sun, offering views from all sides of every debate. Of course there are many excellent blogs and bloggers, but is this seemingly runaway success story all it is cracked up to be? Aren’t we missing something here? It seems to me that the rise of blogging has coincided with a significant fall in the quality of writing on the web. Blogging is producing a generation of bad writing. There are two key issues at play. At a basic level the fundamentals of writing are suffering. Spelling and grammar are increasingly being marginalised. Text speak, where words are abbreviated to be as short as possible, is creeping in from the mobile phone industry. While this helps authors generate speedy output and circumnavigate character limits, it does little for the quality or integrity of the writing. The slipping of these standards is compounded by the lack of an important quality control mechanism – good editing.

Blogging, by its very nature, is self regulated. Rarely is there anyone sub-editing the work, let alone checking for clarity. Of course many bloggers are very capable writers, with the highest regard for language and its numerous rules. But the very nature of blogging means these people will always be outnumbered by the mass of casual, average writers generating poor quality work. The second major issue with blogging is that it seems to have created some kind of online feeding frenzy, where the speed of updates and the volume of words are the driving forces, not the actual content being posted. Martyn Perks, director of thinking apart Ltd – a management and communications consultancy – sums up the problem. “One outcome of the ‘journalism of now’ culture is immediacy overrides the need for detective work to uncover the facts behind the story. The influence of blogging has meant the urge to report immediately is harder to resist. An ‘always-on’ culture means the most important part of the story – namely the facts – get lost in the battle to be first.”

In all types of blogging it is this ‘always-on’ culture that is diluting the quality of the writing, the veracity of the statement, or the reasoning of the comment. It is now all about posting first, and posting regularly. Facts can always be checked later, often pointed out by readers in the comments section. Posts can then be revised or updated as required, providing yet more material to upload. This speed and volume of publication seems to flame the often ferocious nature of a lot blogs, something that does little to boost the credibility or respectability of their material. Peter Gilheany, director of Forster – a PR agency specialising in social media and ethical marketing – has noticed this inherent lack of reasonableness online. “[Blogging is] an area that attracts fevered debate, passionate diatribes and not a little mud-slinging. Immerse yourself in this strange, self reverential world of one-upmanship, and you could emerge believing that the government’s driving desire is to penalise the middle classes, climate change is a crock, car drivers are the most persecuted minority in the UK today and anyone vaguely working class is an illiterate, semi-feral benefits sponge. This may be no different from the letters pages of old. The difference now is speed and scale.” Traditional media, more accurately traditional methods, are different. There is an audience and an editorial team.

That editorial team create and source content specifically for their audience. The content is checked, verified and subject to quality control measures. All this is done to set deadlines, that while strict, support the quality of the output. It’s not perfect, no system ever is, and obviously mistakes can happen. But the basic mechanisms are in place. Blogging has almost none of this. Blogging is content being created then looking for an audience. No one has checked it, it’s simply produced on mass. Some sticks, much doesn’t. For every blog that is a success, there are hundreds, if not thousands, that no one is reading and are destined to be abandoned. We’re not suggesting blogging is without merit. There are a huge number of very successful blogs out there, producing excellent content that more traditional outlets cannot compete with. Look at the recent successes of some political blogs in breaking major stories well before the broadsheets caught up as cases in point. The technology sector is another area that is particularity well served with a number of first class bloggers. In the fast moving world of new software releases, trade shows, and product launches, blogging can really flex its strengths. However, the point remains; there is a wealth of badly conceived, poorly written, and frankly unwanted material out there. Blogs have a significant role to play in how material is distributed and consumed on the web. But let us not forget that the core activity, writing, is a profession like any other. It is a skill some have a gift for, while others have had to work hard to perfect and hone their talents. Just because the technology lets us side-step traditional barriers, doesn’t mean it is advisable to always do so.