The folks on the campaign trail are filing dispatches at krtrail.blogspot.com.
I posted the whole URL to highlight a pet peeve of mine: that the corporation I work for has professional journalists representing our company hosting blogs at Blogspot. There are perfectly sane reasons for why this is happening, as I’ll get into below; for now, though, please indulge my need to vent.
In my mind the surest sign of becoming a truly devoted blogger is getting your blog off Blogspot, whose servers are notoriously finicky and can’t handle much bandwidth. Every morning I run down my list of blogs looking for fresh links and at least three times a week the Blogspot-hosted blogs won’t load. Really, it happens constantly.
Hosting your blog at Blogspot is no big deal if you’re posting three times a week to an audience of a couple hundred. But an outfit like Knight Ridder could conceivably send tens of thousands of visitors to their blogs, and there’s no way Blogspot’s gonna handle that kind of traffic.
Like all big corporations, Knight Ridder has a bureaucracy, a chain of command and zillion hoops that must be jumped through to get the idea of a campaign blog out of a Beltway editor’s head and onto the Web. That stuff takes time, patience and an ability to withstand the aggravation of collaborating with people who have different ideas on how it can/should be done. Meanwhile, Blogger.com lets the Washington office cut through the red tape and get its blog up and running in a few days. And, as noted at the Weblog Blog, where I found the link to KR’s campaign blog, Blogger provides a de facto publishing platform. It’s not very robust but it’s really, really handy and easy to use. Which is why Dave Barry, the closest thing KR has to a rock star in its employ, has his blog at Blogspot.
Throughout the company, meanwhile, there’s a secret suspicion — I’m speculating here — that this whole blogging thing is a fad, and there’s a reluctance to get carried away and invest this time, energy and money in setting up a standard platform for a current enthusiasm that might fade away in 18 months. Perfectly understandable: After the dot-com crash, who wants to take a flier on the next flameout?
Then there’s the problem of blogs being essentially unedited: A news media company is understandably protective of its credibility and the notion of whether blogging adds to or subtracts from a company’s cred isn’t even close to proven. The bloggers chorus is: of course it adds. But these bloggers have an average audience of 237 and nothing to lose if the world finds out they’re not worth anybody’s attention.
Really, what’s happening here is something I’ve seen as long as I’ve had better computers at home than I did at work: It’s easy for an individual to buy the latest, greatest PC because it’s cheap and available. An institution like Knight Ridder, however, has to procure 10,000, which is why my desktop PC at work is vintage 1996 and running Windows ’98. Nobody in our art department has a better Mac than the one in my home office.
I confess my real objection to hosting blogs on Blogspot is snobbery: None of us hardcore geeks uses Blogger anymore, and we think less of anyone who does. We shouldn’t, but we have a lot invested in doing things the hard way (which in our minds is the right way, mind you), so we need to think of ourselves as superior … it makes up for all the actual living we’ve missed while fiddling with our blogs.
As for Knight Ridder, they’ll get around to this blogging thing when it makes sense to do it. (Or, better yet, when it makes money).
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