Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Say it: Signal vs. noise, blogs vs. newspapers

Published on 19/12/07
by Zac Echola

Ryan Sholin posed an interesting question on twitter, and it will take me more than 140 characters to respond.

He says:

Hypothesis: Newspapers in blog form are more pleasant to read than blogs in newspaper form. Discuss.

It all goes back to the signal vs. noise issue. Newspapers write about a lot of stuff I don’t care about. At least I don’t care about anything more than just a general overview.

Scenario: Sometimes a court case will break in the morning and a paper (or a blog, for that matter) will write through the story several times through the day. This is a good thing to do, but if I’m subscribed to that papers feed, I really don’t want my feed reader cluttered with constant updates, when a single story will suffice. It’s just a personal preference. Noise is the number one reason I unsubscribe from blogs, too.

This is why it’s so important to explode categories of news. On a newspaper.com, I should be able to get granular news items. I don’t necessarily just want entertainment news, I want news relating to movies and TV. I don’t want local news, I want news about local crime or city hall. The sports section is a terribly boring section to me, but I love baseball, so I’d like to just follow baseball related stories. See where I’m going?

As for reading blogs in print form? I don’t know. I’d rather not. Unless it was a newspaper from boingboing or Silicon Alley Insider. Can you imagine how infuriating it would be to read kottke.org without the links?

I do have to say that blogs tend to have more readable designs than newspapers and most certainly better designs than newspaper Web sites.

The end. Or is it?

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