Techno heads call it shovelware, a derogatory term. It is the practice of uploading newspaper content onto the internet – or, as bloggers would have it, “dumping” content online with little regard to whether it fits there or not. Surely this is uncharitable? Internet availability of newspaper content is a gift: it makes everyone better informed. How dare they denigrate it with their sniffy jargon, I thought to myself when I first heard the term. The critics know where they can stick their shovel.

Until I understood what they meant. The more you use the internet to read comment in particular, the more you realise that the medium is completely different. A thundering analytical half-page on an op-ed page in print, weighed up and considered by its author and processed by a series of editors and sub-editors, appears at the very least twelve hours after it was commissioned. This is a world away from an online comment piece displayed as part of a blog, with a time line which will show off how immediate a response it is: maybe half an hour or an hour after commission, or even “live”, as the author dreams it up. Those few hours constitute a very fine line, but an important one. Increasingly, though, the distinction between these two styles of writing is becoming blurred. The colloquial feel of blogging is creeping onto print comment pages (example: the expression “take the piss” cropped up on the Guardian op-ed page the other week). Blogged comment should read like an email you would send to an interested friend: it should have spontaneity, immediacy. Print comment should feel more considered, more definitive. It doesn’t have to be po-faced, but it shouldn’t feel too much like the spoken word. Which is maybe what this comes down to: the difference between something you would say in a prepared public speech and something you would say ad hoc, say, in a radio interview. Bloggers don’t post pre-prepared diatribes (or, rather, they sometimes do but they shouldn’t). Similarly, print comment shouldn’t feel like an off-the-cuff remark. Without respecting these differences, each medium loses its unique selling point.

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on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 3:50 pm and is filed under Viv Groskop.
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