Poor Journalism by Weblogs, Inc.
For a little over a week I’ve been debating my position on the state of integrity with online journalism. For the most part I believe traditional newspapers continue to publish a very professional product. But in recent years I’ve even seen the research methods of some journalists be called into question.
However, this post is squarely focusing on the professional blog community, Weblogs, Inc. to be exact. I am an avid reader of blogs like Engadget, Joystiq, Autoblog, TUAW and DownloadSquad.
Last week Erez Zukerman posted the article, Yahoo! signs Twitter real-time search deal, but why?, in which I found myself disappointed in the story. It’s not an uncommon feeling for me when I read some of these professional blogs.
In my opinion these blogs feel that the format dictates news needs to be published immediately. At times I find information is misreported and their isn’t an update or correction. In some cases the article is lifted from other sources, or not news at all. If the blog community wants to continue to grow, a level of professionalism needs to be established.
In this specific case, Zukerman asks why Yahoo would ever sign a deal with Twitter to deliver real-time search results when Microsoft already has a similar agreement in place. I’ve followed the search agreement, just finalized February 19, 2010, between Yahoo and Microsoft ever since it has been announced. Does Zukerman believe Bing was going to be plugged into Yahoo the next day?
My contacts at Yahoo have indicated it could take as much as six months before integration plans are finalized. And it could take another 12 months before Bing is integrated into Yahoo search. That being the case, it isn’t hard to understand why Yahoo has decided to enter into their own agreement with Twitter. They can not afford to lose any more market share because of the lack of features or content.
Obviously I have called out one site, one journalist and one blog post. That is not very fair without documenting similar issues of integrity. However, I stand by my opinion. According to Compete.com, DownloadSquad received over 400,000 unique visitors in the month of January. Potentially 400,000 people received poor, incorrect or incomplete information. In the age of social media and sharing, that number skyrockets even further. Blogs need to take more care in developing content for that reason alone.
