Danny Willis' Blog

A while back David Simon, creator of the only two TV shows set in Baltimore ever, said that “the whole [newspaper] industry will continue to collapse until everyone swallows hard and goes behind a paywall.”

Why and how he’s hilariously wrong despite spending 13 years working at the Baltimore Sun nearly two decades ago has already been gone over better than I could so I’m not going to beat that dead horse.

(Ok, maybe just a little:  A newspaper’s subscription revenue doesn’t even pay for ink, paper and delivery costs.  The actual newsroom operation was ad supported before the Internet was a twinkle in Prodigy’s eye.  Newspapers don’t have to invent a new revenue model, we just need to get better at using the one the rest of the Internet stole from us in the first place.)

Instead I’m going to propose that there’s an actual reason newspapers are getting their lunch eaten by Internet startups:  Consistency of quality.  You can’t be a jack of all trades online like you have to be in print and that’s where very few newspapers have made progress.

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Bloggers don’t exist.

Established media types have tried to draw a distinction between “journalists” and “bloggers” since blog became a word.  Whether it’s out of elitism, ignorance or protectionism isn’t clear and mostly irrelevant, but it boils down to the idea that journalists are established professionals and bloggers are hack amateurs playing reporter.  Those definitions are changing of course, especially now that the Huffington Post and Politico won Pulitzers and the big newspapers did not, but the definitions aren’t the problem.  The problem is more fundamental.

So for the sake of simplicity, here are three reasons “blogger” is a term that needs to go away:

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