My only wish is I had written the article recently published in Business Week, “Blogs will Change your Business,” by Stephen Baker and Heather Green. They did such an excellent job of telling the story and making all the right key points. I’ve got some clients that I’ll be asking to read this one, even if I have to print a copy and take it to them personally.
Right on.
11:57 p.m. Thinking out of the box here for a minute. What would this article look like if it were a real blog, and not just this glossy simulacrum?Think of the way we produce stories here. It’s a closed process. We come up with an idea. We read, we discuss in-house, and then we interview all sorts of experts and take their pictures. We urge them not to spill the beans about what we’re working on. It’s a secret. Finally, we write. Then the story goes through lots and lots of editing. And when the proofreaders have had their last look, someone presses the button and we launch a finished product on the world.
If this were a real blog, we probably would have posted our story pitch on Day One, before we did any reporting. In the blog world, a host of experts (including many of the same ones we called for this story) would weigh in, telling us what’s wrong, what we’re overlooking. In many ways, it’s a similar editorial process. But it takes place in the open. It’s a discussion.
Why draw this comparison? In a world chock-full of citizen publishers, we mainstream types control an ever-smaller chunk of human knowledge. Some of us will work to draw in more of what the bloggers know, vetting it, editing it, and packaging it into our closed productions. But here’s betting that we also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.
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your blog.