TNTJ post on whether we have fallen out of love with blogging

I've got a post on TNTJ, Tommorow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists, which is part of Journalism.co.uk. It stems from Dave Lee's post about whether we have fallen out of love with blogging. Here's an extract:

Since picking up the habit again, my new blog has slowly evolved into not only somewhere to highlight my own work (blogs are almost always, to some degree, self-promoting) but comment on the media industry. It’s gone beyond ‘ranting’ you see, now it’s ‘commenting’. Similar, only more professional – I need the justification.

To answer Dave’s question, have I fallen out of love with blogging? I think you get to this point where it starts being a chore and nothing else. Where you feel the need to post on a topic of the sake of doing so, rather than having any active desire.

I’ve fallen into this framework frequently myself. I’ve gone six weeks without posting anything, occasionally real world commitments like my past month’s work experience have an impact, or the demands of my course.

Twitter is an easier platform

There is no doubt Twitter has had an impact too. It’s just easier – I can stay logged in on the same programme. I could retweet and comment on ten different items in the same time it would take me to write a blog post on one of them. When writing a blog post, I feel a pressure to source multiple opinions, defend my own, refer back to previous posts and put some multimedia in there. With Twitter, I can’t, but ironically this allows me to communicate more.

Not to mention that far more people (not including the random advertising/job/self-proclaimed marketing experts) follow me on Twitter than read my blog. You’re more likely to get a response as well, be they retweets, reactions or counterarguments. It’s all present on one easy programme, and unlike blogs it doesn’t need to be confused by leaping from one separate page to another.