As you know, the Des Moines Register’s teenage son, Juice, has been blogging for about four months now. And while the Juice blogs are continually crappy or just plain boring, we all knew at some point the full Register would have to join in the party. This past week the Register has turned on five initial blogs covering football (for both Hawkeyes and Cyclones), theater, music and books. There’s not much content up there now, we’ll see how the pages fill out. (I’m assuming Nancy Clark won’t be writing for the Des Moines Register Blogs.)
This leads to some interesting questions about blogs and the operation of newspapers.
- Does blog content get fed back to premium research services like Newsbank and Nexis?
- Does the library/archives staff at the Register print copies of the blogs for the official archives?
- Will the Register sell you a reprint of the blog like they will sell you back issues of the paper? (Note: Don’t pay to search the Register archives when you have Google. Just add ‘site:desmoinesregister.com’ to your Google search and you’ll pull up links to all the old Register stories without having to pay a dime.)
All these are holes that show up when old media crosses into the new media world. When Gannett starts buying bloggers, then we should be worried.
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