If you’re going to declare, as today’s New York Times headline does, that blogging is “waning,” it would be good to be able to show a decline in numbers. And that, sadly, is missing from the Times story — which cherry-picks statistics that look very different in their original contexts.
The peg for “Blogging Wanes as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter” is a study (here’s the summary) from Feb. 2010 — more than a year ago. The study showed that the number of kids ages 12-17 who are blogging dropped in half from 2006 to 2009 (14 percent report blogging, from 28 percent). The same study showed that the percentage of adults 30 and older who blog rose from 7 to 11 during the same period. Meanwhile, a more recent Pew study, the Times reports, finds that “Among 18-to-33-year-olds…blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.”
But if you actually look at that report, you find that, overall, blogging is still growing, not waning at all . . .
If you go ahead and read the Times’ article, it offers more nuance than that headline would suggest, leading me to wonder why the unnecessarily skewed headline?
At any rate, yes, Twitter and Facebook are scooping up the bloggers who primarily used the medium to post personal information, connect with friends, or just share links. But I view that as an advance for the medium, as the incursion of F & T into this ream helps define blogs as somewhere where it’s expected that users will provide a certain amount of original content. (If you can remember the old days of blogs, the lack of original content was always old media’s only and best blast against them.)
As revenue possibilities pick up and blogs become more focused around issues and subjects we’re beginning to see the emergence of more substantive and more focused blogs. We’re also starting to see more magazine-like entities that evolved out of blogs or are run on blog platforms.
To its credit, the Times seems to recognize this, which makes it all the stranger that it wants to claim to blogging is waning.
