Website Or Blog?

We recently had a brief eMail correspondence with a self-described classical music reviewer specializing in opera with a not inconsiderable local readership concerning her online presence. Her reviews of local productions have been published in certain print media as well as on online publications, but she expressed a desire to create her own website wherein people could read her feature articles and reviews both current and past, but explained she lacked the technical expertise to set up such a website herself. We suggested to her that the easiest, most economical, and best way to do what she wanted to do was not to create a website with all its associated technical complications and costs, but to publish a blog doing which requires almost no technical expertise, and which can be set up for little or no cost, which suggestion brought this startling response:

I wanted more than a blog because I wanted each review to look like a mainstream review in a newspaper, not like a blog entry. [...] I write polished reviews, not blog entries.

She then continued,

I want people to be able to go back and read what I have written [both features and reviews]. [...] So I believe I need a website with a bio, an archival section of past reviews, and a current section of new reviews.

While the idea that there's a native distinction between a "polished review" and a blog entry may have been justifiable as recently as, say, some five years ago, no such native distinction exists today. A blog is merely a digital publishing platform the nature and look of which resides entirely in the hands and under the control of the author of the blog. A blog entry can look — and read — exactly like "a mainstream review in a newspaper" if that's what the blog author desires. Further, this technically naïve reviewer also seems ignorant of the fact that blog entries are archived automatically by date and/or subject or category by the blog software at the blog author's discretion, and that a bio section, also at the blog author's discretion, can be (and usually is) made an integral part of the blog itself.

We sense that, quite apart from this reviewer's Web-technical naïveté, what's really at work here is the underlying feeling that, generally, the digital media are inferior to the print media in terms of seriousness of purpose and depth of thought, and also in terms of prestige, and that that inferiority can be overcome only by making the digital platform ape the print platform in terms of its physical layout; ergo, the desire for a website rather than a blog.

While it's still true today that in the general public perception digital media do not carry the same prestige as print media, that distinction is fast disappearing, and it won't be long before digital media supplant totally the ink-on-paper model, and this for newspapers most particularly.

It is, however, not true today that print media are necessarily superior to digital media in terms of seriousness of purpose and depth of thought, those qualities residing entirely in the hands and under the control of the author and/or publisher of the publication whether it be print or digital, website or blog, and the perceived distinction between print and digital in this respect merely a matter of current cultural bias and habit-ingrained thinking.

Biases and habits are notoriously resistant to change, but given the first-rate, serious-minded writing available today on a great number of blogs, it's something of a mystery to us why the bias and habit-ingrained thinking against blogs still persist in this matter of seriousness of purpose and depth of thought as it's a view that's decidedly purblind, to characterize the business as gently as possible.

Blogs have come a long way, baby, since their personal diary, techie-chatter beginnings, and it's time the fact was recognized and accepted by all and sundry.