Trying to be Both
I wrote a tweet on Tuesday night about theJournal.ie, and I thought it deserved some clarification.
The tweet in question:
I think Ireland needs & benefits from TheJournal, but it's hampered by being equal parts respected news site & Buzzfeed. Should pick a side.
— Tommy Collison (@tommycollison) July 23, 2013
The Journal started in 2010 with Jennifer O'Connell as editor. I remember being in hospital in the USA when I first read about it. I remember my sense of excitement -- here, at last, was a news organization which would 'get' the internet. I'd followed the likes of Gawker and the Huffington Post for several years, and I'd become disappointed with their seemingly endless soft journalism -- list posts and gossip columns designed to drag eyeballs in and push page-views up.
I hoped that The Journal wouldn't go down that route -- especially since (and I admired them for this) they seemed to be aggressively presenting themselves as a hard news site that deserved to be taken as seriously as the other established players in the Irish media sphere.
In short, they seemed to be letting content drive page-views and not the other way around.
Recently, though, I've found fewer hard-hitting journalism pieces and more of what I can only describe as 'fluff pieces' -- taking a look at the their main site, my attention is drawn to "Chocolate bars: A definitive ranking, from worst to best". On the night I sent my tweet, the two articles that prompted me were "11 Most Awkward Social Situations" being right beside (and given equal precedence to) "Irish prison system ‘over-reliant’ on prolonged solitary confinement".
What I take issue with when it comes to The Journal, and this comes back to what I said in my tweet, is that it wants to have its fingers in two pies -- it wants to be able to write the fluff pieces about ice-cream and the royal baby, but it also wants to be taken seriously the hard-hitting journalism site.
Who's to say they can't be both kinds of site simultaneously? No-one, but I believe trying to be both is hindering their attempts to be either.
