Orginally published in JO magazine
In one corner a young Jordanian design student, lost in her fascination with color, was enthusiastically showing her friends a collection of pink colored artefacts, while, a few meters next to her, a hot-headed political analyst was standing on a wooden box, delivering a long speech, in which he warned that, in one big neo-liberal swoop, the country is being sold to international capitalists.
Unimpressed by all the chatter around him, a computer geek, surrounded by a few of his friends, was explaining why the open source Linux was better than Windows (“for starters it’s free”). A young photographer had just walked in with a set of new photos of Amman’s eastern districts and was starting to hang them on the wall, drawing admiring gazes and comments from some of the people who were just happened to be hanging around.
The biggest noise was coming from behind, where a group of people were, quite loudly, discussing Imad Hajjaj’s latest cartoon and the National Agenda at the same time.
No, this is not a scene from a Ammani café.. Welcome to Jordan’s blogosphere!
Seemingly out of nowhere a new, truly interactive media has sprung to life in Jordan, driven by a generation of people who really know how to use the web’s most potent technology for self publishing: the weblog or blog as it now commonly known.
Jordan’s bloggers have already received considerable media attention. In the past few months reports in the daily press and the glossies, including Royal Jordanian’s inflight magazine, have highlighted Jordan’s growing blogging phenomena, which is not showing any sign of abating. Jordanplanet.com, a website that ‘aggregates’ the output of Jordanian bloggers now list over 40 active blogs, effectively creating an alternative window on Jordan’s news, culture, people, places and politics. That doesn’t count many other blogs that are not included in the ‘planet’.
Mainstream media has always provided the fodder that bloggers can chew on. And it’s no different in the Jordanian blogosphere. A controversial article in any of Jordan’s dailies is almost immediately ‘re-blogged’ by someone, of course with the usual approving, disapproving or analysing commentary by the blogger. Because blogs are a two way media, the ensuing reader comments are an extremely important aspect of the blogging experience.
On some Jordanian blogs it is not uncommon to see stories, which receive dozens of reader comments, often engaging in really heated, open and free discussions, with people pitching in from around the corner and around the globe.
All of this stands in stark contrast to Jordan’s traditional print media, which clearly is missing the ongoing online conversation. This is all the more ironic considering that the topics being discussed often originate from the web sites of Jordan’s newspapers.
The reasons for this disconnect are multiple. Jordanian newspaper websites, without an exception, are still mere electronic versions of their print editions. Most, if not all of these sites’ content is updated once a day, namely after the papers go to print at night. Attempts of true, up to the minute online publishing remain scarce. Then there is the problem of real or perceived limits of press freedom for print publications and, consequently, their official websites. The above-mentioned hot-headed political commentator would never dream to write an op-ed in one of the dailies.
Looking at the home pages of Jordan’s dailies, the only obvious interactive feature is the online voting box (“Do you think that the government is justified in raising fuel prices”). Neither discussion forums nor article commenting are present. The traditional press is still a one way communication channel (from publisher to readers but not the other way around). That’s by no means a Jordanian thing by the way. Newspapers worldwide are finding it difficult to adapt to the digital age in which every other media source is just a click away and where readers have the same tools for electronic publishing as traditional publishers. In recent years, blogs have been eating into mainstream media’s audience traffic. Do a search on Google on any subject and chances are that you’ll end up on a blog instead of the site of a major media organization. Blogs are social in nature and thus are highly interlinked, causing them to often score better than, say, newspapers in online searches.
A blogger journey might start on the home page of a daily. But with a click of a button she can link to a story, add her two cents and start an avalanche of a conversation with a dozen of her blog’s readers. The paper’s editor’s have no choice but watch from afar. If they care, that is.
Comments
6 responses to “Stuck on newsprint (or how the daily press is missing Jordan’s online conversation)”
Are you the author of the article? I wasn’t able to tell who is the author!
Great article… I love JO magazine. But I disagree with their conclusion that “the paper’s editors have no choice but to watch from afar.” The BBC News web site adds a feature to select stories allowing people to comment on the story. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4630938.stm for one example. (I don’t necessarily endorse any of the opinions expressed by the author or the commenters in this story, I’m just citing it as an example.)
Any newspaper could add this feature to it’s web site. They could even print some of those comments in the next day’s newspaper, if they wanted. However, that would just encourage more people to read the paper on-line than buy a paper copy on the street… and they make much more advertizing money by keeping paper readership high. The trick is to learn how to generate money by attracting readers to the internet site, yet not neglect those readers who will never favor the internet over the newspaper.
I am the author indeed.
I read this article in, I think, December’s issue. I thought it was brilliant then, as I find it is now.
Very nicely said,Ahmad.
I wonder if any of the main stream newspapers in Jordan would agree to devote one of their pages for the blogger- cloumns! They are starting to do that in some newspapers in some parts of the midwestern states in the United States.