Alan Morrison has a great post that neatly summarises the common strand underlying the things Andrew Grant-Adamson (repeatedly) Kevin Anderson, Paul Bradshaw and I (not to mention loads of other people) have been saying over the past few months about established media’s sometimes clumsy efforts at tacking social media “stuff” onto their existing publishing business:

[D]on’t just bolt blogging or video onto your existing publishing model, because if you do you’re missing half of the point: contributing to these new media is a lot about having a conversation with their readers, NOT just megaphoning down to them, as per the traditional model.

That’s what differentiates Web 2.0 from the first wave – as the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto say, it’s about having an interactive conversation with people in normal language, not the Big/Old Media “experts” talking down to the audience.

So why are smart people in established media brands making such clumsy “Dad dancing at the party”-type mistakes with their blogs? One word – paradigm. Mentally they’re still stuck in the industry paradigm (called it mindset or model if you want) that says this is the way to do things.

That’s about right. Kevin recently boiled it down even further: “blogging isn’t a publishing strategy, it’s a community strategy”. Robin Hamman elaborated with a long post explaining what this means at the BBC.
Of course, not everyone thinks having a conversation is a worthwhile objective for news organisations. In that case, don’t bother with so-called “blogs”. That’s OK, too. Your loss, but OK.