Mainstream Imitates Blogging

Maybe I've been living under a rock, but have you checked out the Globe and Mail online version lately? Notice anything different about their format? There are now comments links for every single article. If bloggers thought we were going to remain enigmatic guerilla journalists forever, look out -- you are about to become mainstreamed! Yes, the MSM is mowing your lawn kids.

This new comment capability is something I think will transform the nature of those dinosaurs of the broad sheet. The Globe has instantly taken on the look and feel of a blog with authority. The mainstream media has melted into the blogosphere here in a fascinating combination of mediums.

It looks like the good Globe people are doing this in earnest, but I can't help but wonder about new accountability issues that undoubtedly will come into play for them. They are de facto publishing unsolicited commentary from the general public, which includes, as others have found, nutcases, racists and a plethora of haters that no sensible human would want leaving dirty footprints on their sites. Trying to moderate these could seriously become an expensive, time consuming nightmare and bring up new questions about editorial control versus the free nature of public comments sections.

Just ask Pierre Bourque over at Bourque Newswatch, who tried allowing comments for a while earlier this year but had to abandon the practice after realizing that he could not effectively control the haters, ideologues and cheap spam trollers due to time constraints.

Sure, the Toronto Star and National Post have their resident bloggers. Actually, I'm not so impressed with the Star online these days as they seem to be going through a bit of a prolonged identity crisis. I mean, nice new look, but where is Zerb? Either way, in my opinion, the Star remains the leading mainstream online supplier of breaking news in Canada, owing to their consistent updates throughout the news day with wire stories and local scoops. They were innovators but they are increasingly lagging. But I digress.

If we could just get just one online Canadian paper to give us the whole nine yards, including resident bloggers, comments and trackback links from Technorati, like the Washington Post does to show what individual bloggers are writing about their articles, we would be making some serious progress. (To see how Technorati works, scroll down on the right side of my home page and click on Blogs That Link Here. The site crawls the web looking for your url and permalinks and let's you know who has linked to anything you've written.)

But alas, personal experience reminds me that technological change and bureaucratic process are often at odds with each other, so we will have to be patient and wait. That said, Canada's online papers have come a helluva long way since just last year baby...

Exciting times for giddy technophiles and communications peeps.