Alex Byers | storyteller • optimist

One of these things is not like the other.

Since we expanded The Hatchet’s social media presence and redesigned the blogs earlier this year, we’ve seen a fairly marked drop in comments. But we’ve increased our blogging four-fold. So, what gives?

The culprit seems to be a large bump in retweets. No stats for you, but those are clearly way up, and will continue to increase as more of our readers join the Twitterverse. Our new blog design, too, may be pushing readers to tweet rather than comment, as we’ve added the flashy green retweet button, and relegated the comments button to the plain old gray text.

The real question is this: does it matter? Is a bump in retweets a fair trade for a dearth of comments? While its pretty close to a wash, I’d say it’s no problem. Readers have the ability to squeeze in a short comment before the RT in their tweet, and the retweets clearly get our product out to more people – a fundamental goal. And if more people are reading, there is a better chance for a good number of comments anyway.

The problem is that it’s tough to tell how many of our readers have the chance to retweet. Twitter is exploding – especially on campus – but its probably fair to say that a large majority of students and other GW community members don’t have twitter and thus won’t retweet. Of course, everyone can comment – and if we’re lowering the chance they will by featuring the retweet button instead of the comment button, are we shooting ourselves in the foot? Maybe.

Incidentally, I asked this same question in a forum over at Wired Journalists. If you’re a journalist, you should check that site out.

Earlier this week, I came across this brash but probably realistic post on the old guard of journalism and what it might take to finally take the industry into its next phase.

Probably not what most old school newspaper execs want to hear, but this piece has some pretty salient points. Among them:

• When will these guys learn that paid content is not the way to go? People have gotten news free of charge on the ‘net for more than 10 years. They aren’t about to stop.
• This one is probably the most difficult one to swallow for many in the biz: “Quality journalism is expensive, and to the extent that it provides a public good, we will find ways to fund it. But top-heavy, poorly run, arrogant-to-the-bitter-end media companies? This is their crisis, not our crisis, and it certainly isn’t about journalism.”

The media landscape is changing (rocket science, I know). I am very confident that in the end, we’ll still get our news – and it’ll be well done. But it’s not going to look like it used to. Whatever newspaper execs used to make, whatever the business model used to look like – they’re not going to make that much and it’s not going to look like that. The sooner the people in charge stop trying to salvage what’s on the way out and just embrace what’s coming, the better they – and we – will be.