March 7, 2007

Spiked

Bob Krumm has the nitty gritty details on the collateral damage from the Al Gore Energy Hog story that I mentioned was coming. As the Nashville Scene reveals today, The Tennessean had Gore's utility usage data for more than a month but chose to not publish a story about it. Then a small think tank and some bloggers ran journalistic circles around the daily newspaper, not just on breaking the story, but on pursuing all the angles and follow-ups. Their reward: A big surge in web traffic that could have gone to The Tennessean.

Just because a newspaper has blogs doesn't mean it "gets" the new media world it now lives in. Like many newspapers, The Tennessean thinks of itself as still the gatekeeper of news and information in its community. But like every other newspaper it no longer is, and, in a world of the Internet, email, millions of bloggers and the new mass-collaborative journalism, it never will be again.

Some interesting comparative data: According to a Google blogs search, 92 different blogs linked to my main post on the Gore story here at BillHobbs.com while another 83 linked to a similar version of the same post which I published at the Ecotality.com blog, where I write about things environmental for Ecotality, a hydrogen fuel cell technology company. But only eight blogs linked directly to the Tennessean's story. Most of the major traffic-driver blogs that linked to one of my stories linked to the version at Ecotality.

It's not surprising, then, that The Tennessean didn't grab the web traffic with the Gore story the way I and a number of other bloggers did (Dan Riehl's posts, in particular, which built on my work in impressive ways, drew huge attention in the blogosphere.)