‘Blogging was before my time’
A Pew Research Center study released Wednesday confirmed what I’ve suspected since July 23, 2009: Blogging has jumped the shark.
Back in July, over beers at the Old Lompoc 5th Quadrant in North Portland, an up-and-coming young journalist named Daniel Bachhuber, who is one of the smartest guys I know in new media, said something that left my head spinning:
“Blogging,” he said, “was before my time.”
Blogging, as a literary form, is only about 15 years old. Compare that to newspapers, which have been around in their current form for about 400 years. The implication, to me, was that newspapers were rushing to emphasize blogs precisely at the time younger readers were abandoning blogs in favor of short-form communication. Think texting and Facebook status updates.
Bachhuber is young, but he’s no novice when it comes to knowing what’s happening in journalism today. The University of Oregon student (environmental sciences, journalism and economics) is co-founder and executive director of CoPress, a fast growing organization that provides technical infrastructure for college publications. He’s also an editorial intern for Publish2, the link-sharing service for journalists. Ironically, he also writes a blog, or to use his retro term, weblog.
Matt Davis, news editor of the Portland Mercury, weighed in with his own thoughts in a December 2009 blog post titled “Hanging Blog Syndrome.” For him, Nora Ephron’s screenplay Julie & Julia, whose social-media centerpiece is a daily food blog, was a memorial to blogs in the same way Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail signaled the end of e-mail as a shiny new object.
“I now find myself spending more time on the Tweetdeck, and interacting with the community on Facebook, for work as well as for personal enrichment,” Davis writes of his own evolution beyond pure blogging. “Those lines, too, have blurred.
“Blogs, it seems to me, were a glimmer of what was to come. In two years I expect us all to be inter-connected on mobile devices, and for our sophistication with social networks to be stratospheric compared to today. 24 months is such a long time on the internet.”
Now comes the Pew Research Center to tell us what we already suspected: Only 15 percent of Millennials (roughly 18 to 29 years old) blogged in 2009, down from 24 percent in 2007. At the same time, the percentage of bloggers over age 30 has risen: 11 percent in 2009, up from 7 percent in 2007.
The lesson: Blogging is something parents and grandparents do.
Let’s hope Nora Ephron doesn’t write a screenplay anytime soon about real-time content delivery.