Power of the Front Page

This is my second piece on blogging this week?I promise I?ll lay off next week. I leave for BlogNashville early Thursday morning (like, 7am), so bear with me.

Anyway, I was reading Dan Gillmor?s fantastic blog today and saw this story about how newspapers are now trying to figure out not only what is (and isn?t) popular, but that they?re trying to tap in to what readers want to see.

It?s a very interesting conundrum that you want to pay the most to reporters who write what people want to read (this would, of course, make the celebrity gossip columnist a bajillionare), but you also have the decision as to what is on the front page.

The Power of the Front Page sounds like a great journalism book title, but in the end it?s about control. Control, as we all know from watching reality shows, is power. He who controls what others do, whether it be with money, time, or energy, is the most powerful guy in the room. The newspaper editor originally, and that is to say until blogs got recognized as true journalism outlets, had all of the power. He made the decision as to what got the big bold print. What picture would iconicize that day in history.

Now the world is moving to a much broader and interesting place in terms of where it gets its facts, stories, and information. However, and this is where USA Today?s ideaology strikes me as something very late-90?s-esque, it is very hard to track where your audience is, how they use your content, and how best to manage those statistics. Allow me to illustrate my point:

A popular blog runs off an RSS feed. If it doesn?t have one, it isn?t a popular blog. My point is, that while some RSS feed statistics exist, they are hard to pin down. You never know what happens to content on an RSS feed, how it is aggregated (and re-aggregated) and where it might end up. For example, some person may take this blog and stick an interesting post in a newsletter sent to 10,000 people. If I know no one on that newsletter, and that newsletter is only sent to a select group of people, I may see an increase in traffic but never realize I just affected 10,000 people I never knew.

The ability to tell what is important and interesting to you, and to put it in on your front page, that is control. How people then take that data, manipulate and republish and/or repost it?that is the power of community, and conversely the power of blogs.

Mr. Gillmor?s point on community deciding what stories are most popular is a definite truism, but at the same time I do believe that some editorial duties need to exist. Far too many people are interested in what happened this week with Brad Pitt. Others want to know what?s going on in the world of politics. If you can use and manage this reader data properly, even if it is just based on feed statistics (which, by their very nature, can be a little abstract), to determine what?s important and what is home-page worthy, then that is a community (and, again, blogs) in action.

I think that is powerful stuff. It?s very cool and interesting to notice the wave of change, the realization that business, that newspapers, that any journalism outlet, whether it?s the 15 year old kid sick of his parents or the 80 year old writing his memoirs online, can have equal footing in the marketplace.

On the internet it is our eyes which vote on what is most important, our eyes which tell the world what we want to see. It is our hearts that give us the ability to write these posts, it is our minds that let us appreciate it. The future awaits!

Long live the blog. Family Matters for this week will hitcha tomorrow.

How long do I have to climb
Up on the side of this mountain of mine?