One of my favorite new blogs comes from a mainstream media outfit, Business Week. It’s their Working Parents blog. They’ve gotten together five moms and two dads to write regularly about issues that impact parents trying to combine work and family. These issues affect every family with kids at home, because even when one parent drops out of the workforce, the balance between professional and domestic life is not easily achieved.
I’m a Business Week print subscriber, too. The March 13th print issue includes the piece Do I Deserve A Wedgie? [subscribers only, sorry] by Michael Mandel responding to comments from bloggers on his recent cover story Why The Economy Is A Lot Stronger Than You Think [registration required]. The discussion continues on Mandel’s blog, Economics Unbound. I haven’t seen another media outfit so willing to intermingle their own print and blogging content with what bloggers have to say. They actually print excerpts from blog posts and comments in their magazine. BW doesn’t set itself apart from its readers and commenters like so many magazines do.
Business Week shows respect for bloggers and readers in both their blogs. In creating a working parents blog, they recognize that many of their readers will be of an age and demographic to be struggling with the balance between work and family. Contrast this with The Atlantic Monthly, who insists on publishing scathing pieces about upper middle-class motherhood by a certain contributing editor who seems to loathe any woman besides herself who dares to make plans for financial, intellectual, and professional achievement. If you are a mother and reader of The Atlantic, you know who she is. I no longer subscribe to that magazine. It’s a curious thing to me that the editors would launch poison arrows at the very women that are likely to be reading it. Does it create buzz? Probably. But it doesn’t make for devoted readers. Okay, BW is not The Atlantic. The Atlantic Monthly is uber-smart, uber-sophisticated, better than we, their riff-raff readers, are. BW doesn’t have any such pretensions.
BW’s economics and working parenting blogs give me hope for a new kind of collaboration between bloggers and traditional media. Malcolm Gladwell’s blog, where he revisits his past ideas and positions (for example recently coming out in favor of government-funded and managed healthcare a la Canada), is another place where I see the future of MSM-blogger relations. It’s more evolutionary than revolutionary but it’s exciting nonetheless.
I know other newspapers and magazines have faced difficulties trying to interact with the blogosphere; The Washington Post’s abortive attempt at allowing commenting comes to mind. What media outlets do you think are doing a good job evolving with new communication possibilities?
UPDATE 3/5/05: Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 and Atlantic Media discusses Business Week’s interactions with the blogosphere.
2 Comments
Great analysis. I’ve been impressed with their use and understanding of blogging as well. Why don’t more journalists get that blogging is a 2-way conversation? Have they done the one-way thing for too long to change?
thanks for this post, Anne. Very interesting indeed (and I am in total agreement about that AM editor–ugh). i also wonder if this model can be transposed, and made easily available. i currently work with an international scholarly network community (www.h-net.org) and we are exploring precisely these possibilities (amid a lot of hair-pulling). right now it is very similar to what you describe here,if you turn the clock back over a decade and replace blogging with listservs and other clunky pearl-scripted pieces. because it is email driven, it is currently getting blacklisted by yahoo and aol for “spamming.” there is a lot of debate right now about how to push the organization forward technologically. we (my outfit) is pushing for purely online communications with a range of options about to receive updates (rss, email alerts, etc). but there is a lot of resistance (people like their email communications). i really do think this could be a matter of life or death for the organization.