Press Pass: Blogging by the Numbers
5/7/2009 6:38 PM | 10 Comments | Page 3 of 4
Figure 4 (Click to expand)
As for the allegation that blogs post too many rumors, in the week I looked at,
only 8 percent of the total blog posts were based on "rumored" information. This was comparable to 1UP's news section, which included rumors in 13 percent of its news posts. The overwhelming majority of these rumor posts were simply a repetition of rumors reported elsewhere, and many were followed up with official information from the source soon after. In all cases, the rumors were reported clearly and with due skepticism. Used sparingly and responsibly like this, I think reporting on credible rumors can give readers an early edge on key information without hurting a site's credibility.
Who's stealing from whom?
Figure 5 (Click to expand)
Another favorite gripe of blog readers and blog detractors alike -- they all just steal content from each other. While this is true to an extent, there's by no means a 100-percent overlap between the content of the blogs and news sites I looked at. Even discounting the totally original content on the blogs (remember, that's 21 percent of all the blog posts I looked at),
over half of all stories and nearly one-third of all distinct posts only appeared on one of the five sites I looked at. To put it another way, almost one in every three non-original posts you see on one of these sites discussed a story you would not see on the other four. For one reason or another, there were a good number of stories that one outlet considered interesting enough to point out, that the other sites did not. By comparison, only roughly 2 percent of the stories were so important that all five sites decided to cover them.
This story breakdown highlights the blogger's important role as a curator of sorts for the Web. There's an incomprehensibly large amount of game information floating around out there on the Net every day -- press releases and screenshots and videos and trailers and tidbits about games you've never heard of. A blog could simply post every bit of this news that comes across its desk (see:
GoNintendo) but most bloggers pick and choose what to include on the blog, sifting through this information and finding the stuff they think their readers will be interested in. This is a large, unseen part of a blogger's job, and results in different focuses for even the biggest, most all-encompassing blogs. Which one you read depends largely on how well the bloggers' tastes in information match with yours. And if the big blogs are too broad, there are
plenty of smaller blogs with narrower focuses that might be a better match for you.
Even when blogs do overlap, it's not like these sites are stealing words wholesale from each other.
Joystiq,
Kotaku and
Destructoid all covered David Reeves' "exit interview" with GamesIndustry.biz, but each focused on slightly different elements of the interview and included different editorial comments on the move. Sure, reading all three doesn't get you any additional information, but neither does watching CNN and MSNBC at the same time when there's breaking news. You pick which one you like most, based on its reporting style, and leave it at that.
