It’s an interesting phenomenon, journalists who take their first plunge into the blogosphere, read journalist blogs, find them boring and then conclude that blogs are pointless for one reason or another. Here’s the most recent example. A journalist at Arbetarbladet heads out on a quest to solve the mystery about blogs and starts with 1) Linda Skugge at Expressen, 2) Fredrik Virtanen at Aftonbladet, 3) Helle Klein at Aftonbladet. Maybe she read some more, but the article doesn’t give it away.
I guess it is natural to turn to the familiar and check out your buddies blogs. But by picking the low-hanging fruit they miss most of the point in blogs. It should be required by any journalist who intend to write about blogs in the future to check out one of the aggregator services like nyligen.se or svensk.lemonad.org so that they manage to read at least one non-journalist blog before announcing their verdict.
The journalist continues to question who on earth reads these blogs.
“Och vem läser dem? Vem har tiden och lusten att sitta och surfa runt bland de miljarder bloggar som finns? Jag fattar inte.”
Well, to quote my blog reader survey, the average Swedish blog reader is a man, 26-30 years old, has a college or university degree and would vote for the moderate party if there was an election in Sweden today. Half of them spend more time (34 minutes or more) per day reading blogs than the average Swede spends reading newspapers (28 min), like Arbetarbladet. Maybe the question should be the opposite – who has time to read all these newspapers?
The blog survey can be found here (pdf) in Swedish. An English version is just about ready and will be up any day.