NYT reaching peace with blog?
Sunday, July 29th, 2007
The New York Times has a tortured history with blogs. I’m not talking about NYT’s love hate relationship with blogs as media, but about the paper’s difficulty settling on a standard word for what one early Times article called “something called a blog.” Times’ stand-ins range from “weblog” to “Internet web log.” Is there no AP or Times style-guide yet for blog?
Mireya Navarro got it right with “blog” in her profile of Perez yesterday.
“Blog” shows up in 2029 articles in an archive search of Times stories, with half of those usages occurring since last June.
Here’s a chronology Times’ usage of “blog.”
2001: 1 article, a short mention in “business briefs.”
2002: 13 articles.
2003: 65 articles.
2004: 136 articles.
2005: 257 articles.
2006: 734 articles.
2007: 568 articles.
That’s a pretty steep curve and shows no sign of abating. Though at some point it will have to flatten out since “blog” can’t replace every verb and noun in the Times.
Sadly, other terminology crops up from time to time.
The conceptually redundant “Internet blog” has made several appearances this year, most recently in a July 15 Josh Barbanel story mentioning the blog Brownstoner.
The alphabetically redundant “Web blog” has appeared seven times, most recently on April 7 in a Liz Robbins story.
The acceptable “weblog” shows up in 91 articles, most recently June 11.
The Times likes the de-portmaneaued “web log,” which pops up 295 in a search of the Times’ archives, including five usages in ’07.
The good news: it’s been a couple of years since the Times rolled it all together into “Internet web log.”
Here’s the blog distribution among Times’ sections as of July 29, 2007.
Some other words to watch for in the Times. “Social media” has appeared in 16 articles. “Search engine marketing,” the burgeoning industry that’s transforming marketing, has been used in only 20 articles.
While “Google” has appeared in 3392 articles, the two engines of its huge financial success have gotten much less coverage: “Adwords” (22) and “Adsense” (27).