A Question Mark Away

A Question Mark Away

Jan 07

Clearly, we need some new words.

Right now, the term “blogging” covers anyone who writes online on a regularly updated site. Whether you are doing robust traditional journalism for an online outlet or reporting on what you had for lunch today at LiveJournal, you are a blogger. This means the expectations of the reader have no context whatsoever, other than the other posts on each blog itself; the site you click on could offer any range of content, and there’s no standards or benchmarks with which to measure what you’re reading.

This occurred to me upon seeing the story at Blog@Newsarama about the sale of 1UP and Electronic Gaming Monthly to Hearst. This has led to speculation that EGM will shutter its doors with the next issue.

The sale of 1UP has been confirmed at the site; the piece about EGM still seems to be speculation, although there may have been a bit of confirmation I missed.

Blog@Newsarama’s Lucas Siegel writes up the story with the following headline:

1UP Sold to UGO, EGM to End This Month

I saw that headline, and immediately thought, “Okay, wow, the news about EGM must have been confirmed.” I even went so far as to assume that Blog@ had themselves confirmed it. Turns out it’s still speculation–Siegel is simply “confirming” it himself, because it was initially reported alongside the 1UP news.

Now, 1UP.com has confirmed the sale of the site and its related properties, but has yet to comment on the future of EGM. As the sources got the first part of the story right, odds are the rest is, as well. The magazine was started in 1989. It leaves in its wake Gamepro and Game Informer as the last two major multiplatform gaming magazines published in the U.S.

I don’t necessarily think that’s wrong, or that he shouldn’t have made the leap from speculation to probable fact himself without at least trying to get comment or confirmation from a source at EGM, Ziff Davis, or Hearst. There’s not a right or wrong way to blog.

But man, that headline needs a question mark. Adding it at the end…

1UP Sold to UGO, EGM to End This Month?

…takes a story that seems to offer a new piece of confirmed news and more clearly communicates it as what it is: An unconfirmed piece of information that may or may not be true.

That’s not a slam on Siegel; it’s not how I would have played it, and I do think the headline is misleading without the question mark, but his angle is a perfectly acceptable way to present the information. It’s more that without some kind of context for the type of writing Blog@Newsarama is offering–a category to slot it into, or a term that captures what the site is doing–the headline without a question mark could be viewed as misleading to the reader. Other than interviews and guest posts, Blog@ has always struck me as a more informal blogging environment than as a source for real journalism…which again suggests the question mark may have been a good idea.

It all gets back to this idea of “blogging,” and what it means, and how the word is overused and too inclusive. Blogging doesn’t need a single set of almighty standards, but it would help if we started thinking about how we’re going to distinguish between the various types of blogs, and stopped treating the format as a catch-all without any clear benchmarks or expectations. A novel isn’t a newspaper isn’t a zine; maybe it’s time to start making those distinctions online.