As you may have seen, The Observer reported that the New York Times is likely going to close some of their blogs. (Gawker handicapped the carnage.) This makes me wonder what some of the other large media companies who have started blog networks will do. AOL and MTV immediately come to mind. I mean, you can chuckle at some of the obscure NYT titles, but MTV has a blog dedicated only to comic books turning into movies. Really!
Yeah, but those MTV blogs are just illiterate SEO bait. E.g.: "The comics Twitterverse appears to be nearly unanimous in its indifference to whatever may actually be going on with Tiger Woods..."
posted by Keith at 2:10 PM on December 3, 2009 
Depends on teh blog networks. Newspapers need them quality because they cant afford to be seen to have poor writers, but SEO bait, as Keith says, is fine on something like MTV where half the people who read it speak in incomprehensible 'txt spk' - and they can have any of their monkeys they emply to do anything write those in their lunch breaks
posted by Nick Coffee at 7:15 PM on December 3, 2009
makes ME wonder just what the difference between a "blog" and something other than a blog on NYT.com is, what the editors think it is, and what it really ought to be.
I always thought the thing for newspapers to do in reaction to blogs'd have been to incorporate some blog-like features into all of their content, not start up blogs as some sort of sideline thing. maybe i'm finally being proven right?
OK, maybe not. But Pogue is a perfect example: why a column and separate blog posts somewhere else, etc.?
posted by alesh at 10:16 PM on December 3, 2009
It does seem a tad all over the place. Online news sites should be able to integrate 'opinion blogs' with no problems at all - indeed a bit of careful management on their behalf could see them turn into a useful traffic and revenue generator in the same way many personal blogs do.
But yet again they fail because of a determination to cling to old thinking rather than embracing the future. Newspapers really aren't learning from their mistakes
posted by Curtains Ian at 7:40 AM on December 4, 2009
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