Column v. Blog!

These recent comments by NY Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, have been getting lots of on-line attention.

"'I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care, either,' he says.  The average age of New York Times readers is 42, Sulzberger says, and that hasn't changed in ten years. The average age of the paper's Internet readers is 37, which shows that the group is managing to recruit young readers too."

So far so good, but now listen to what Sulzberger has to say about bloggers.  "'We are curators,' he explains ... People don't click onto the New York Times to read blogs: they want reliable news that they can trust."

Oh really....There are a lot more curators out there than you.  And anyway, the right comparison isn't news to bloggers. His competition on the new front is google.  The right comparison is bloggers to columnists.  Even his top-flight lineup of Mo-Do, Friedman, Krugman, Brooks, Herbert and Kristof is up against some pretty stiff competition on the blogsphere.  And it's only going to get worse... 

I'm an avid Times reader - have been for more than two decades. I now spend 5-10 minutes max on its oped page, compared to 4-8 hours on-line. I not only  prefer reading bloggers to columnists, I very much prefer blogging to writing a column.  For several reasons. Columnists have to cover a wide range of turf, are forced to write in a formulaic 850 word framework, can't hyper-link to source  material and other content, and often are writing in areas and on subjects where they are not really experts. Plus they have "artificial" deadlines and can't engage their audience. It seems to me that the on-line future favors bloggers over columnists in a big way.  And if Sulzberger can't see this,  others in the news and media space surely will.