Bloggers: Both Slayer and Savior?

First off, go read a newspaper. Better yet, buy one. I'll be right here.






Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed the feel of the flattened wood pulp in your hands and the distinct smell that wafts out from each opened page. I hope you got some ink on your fingers.

Truth be told, the days of the newspaper as a standard vehicle of journalism may well be numbered. Today it's all computers, tablets, phones and the like. Digital signals are winning a war of attrition to replace Linotype shelves and presses everywhere.

That being said, there might be a reason they're lining up to be on the right side of writing history.

Take, for example, a pair of bloggers on the vanguard of the blossoming industry's effort to rule the writing land.

Jared Eng, the 28-year-old writer of the extremely popular Just Jared. Eng's is a site that focuses exclusively on the lives of the rich and famous. But it's not just any fan site. A recent New York Times article chronicled just how successful Eng's blog has become. Personal, intimate access to Hollywood princes and debutants and a typically friendly (read: very little gossip) feel netted the site 3.3 million individual viewers in December. 3.3 million viewers for a five-man operation.

What happens when you combine millions of followers with the minimal overhead required by a blog?

“We’ve grown this into a real, viable business,” said Jason, Jared's oldest brother and the manager of the site's finances. “This year we’re easily going to gross seven figures.”

Meanwhile, Daniel Cavanaugh, 26, has been capturing the hyper local coverage that newspapers cling to as their last bastion to ward off the big scary internet since 2006. Cavanaugh's site covers the neighborhood of Gerritsen Beach, a 5,000-resident New York burrow southeast of Brooklyn that spans less than a mile in any direction, and reportedly gets more than 900 page hits per day.

Cavanaugh works with a degree of transparency that even newspapers will sometimes shy away from. He uses hidden cameras, never identifies himself as a reporter, and grants no port of harbor for "off the record" fliers. It's risky, and often dangerous, but readers soak it in.

He claims not to be a reporter, but really, Cavanaugh may be more of a reporter than most that dot the payrolls of newspapers around the country.

Thing is, the success of these blogsters and so many others like them may be more of a road map than a death knell.

Think, millions upon millions of readers gaining access in an instant. No more gathering today's news to tell the world tomorrow. Imagine if the New York Times or Chicago Tribune transitioned to an online-exclusive method. Say they had access to their already-present pool of readers, plus a few here and there that will access their publication now because of an enhanced online identity.

"But don't they already have that?"

Yes, and in some sense, that's the beauty of it; the infrastructure is already there.

"So why would this change anything?"

Here's an interesting little fact: The New York Times spends roughly $644 million per year on production and delivery costs. That's more than three times what the publication spends on salary and benefits for its writers, editors and so forth.

Say the Times were to take some of that freed-up capital and invest in a more attractive, more feature-rich online component, and absorb the rest as profit.

So, the Times, and for the sake of argument, any newspaper, could move to a system of online subscriptions and micro-transactions ($20 per month for unlimited access, or fifty cents for a given article or page). Yes, there would be growing pains, and the model would likely only see its greatest potential fulfilled if several, perhaps all, major papers adopted a similar model, but it could be the solution. It could even solve the age old issue of newspapers being forced to rely exclusively on ad revenue for sustenance.

So could the antidote for sick newspapers be found at the very same source as the poison? Could bloggers be using a shadow of the future model of journalism?

Newspapers today may not be struggling to survive the longest; they may be in a race to grow up the slowest.