Buzz Marketing with Blogs: AP’s Not-Blog: The “New Blog Paradox”

AP’s Not-Blog: The “New Blog Paradox”

The Associated Press has launched its first not-blog.

Normally, a sentence like that would include a link, you know, to the blog. But the AP has not created a blog, any more than I can create a new Graceland by putting a sign on my apartment door saying “Now Entering Travis’ Graceland.”

The biggest clue: the AP has no actual permanent Web URL for the blog and its ~~entries~~ articles. The old ones disappear from all their places on the Web after about a month. That’s completely unlike any blog.

The AP also doesn’t publish ~~entries~~ articles anywhere on a single page in reverse chronological order. It rarely has more than one link per ~~entry~~ article, and sometimes no links at all. It doesn’t have comments. It doesn’t have an RSS feed, to say nothing of a blog roll, trackbacks, etc. It’s not using blog software. The writer, though he does use a lot of parenthesis and asides, seems to have left no Google trace of having blogged before.

Any one of these omissions is understandable. In aggregate, they add up to exactly no blog.

Does it have any blog characteristics at all? Only two, as far as I can tell. It’s named “Bad LANGuage: AP’s pop culture blog” and it’s written by Derrick Lang, so it’s got the word “blog” in the title, and it’s got a kitchy pun.

Suw Charmin writes a long post at Corante about the mistakes AP has made with this “fake blog.” I wouldn’t call it a fake blog, but rather, a not-blog.

Even E&P, the old media B2b publication highlights how little the AP’s blog is actually a blog. They point out it’s edited in advance, but that the writer has “fairly free rein.” It’s not published whenever the writer thinks it’s appropriate, but rather on a daily schedule. It’s exactly like any other series of articles produced by the AP for use in print, distributed via the AP wire.

So here’s the paradox of launching a new blog. I strongly recommend you just jump in, and refine and redesign and learn as you go. It’s hard to get everything right at the beginning—I certainly didn’t. Bloggers can be tremendously helpful and forgiving, and it’s far better to launch and improve than never to try in the first place. But, if you launch as poorly as the AP has, it can take a long time to recover. So launch and learn, but don’t screw up: that’s the paradox, the connundrum

I would not be surprised to see this problematic old media experiment run about five months until the first talk has died down, and then it’ll quietly disappear. Maybe true AP blogging will happen, but it won’t grow from this seed. AP: Next time you start a blog, start it by hiring a blogger.

Thanks, Manny Mellor, for bringing this to my attention.

Posted by Travis Smith on 03/04 at 11:35 PM • Blogging News