Johnny L: Why should I believe what you write about your supposed sources on MetsBlog? I think you’re full of crap. What do you think of that?
Matthew Cerrone: OK, then. I understand.
I’m writing this, and I realize you may not know who I am.
See, I’m used to writing on MetsBlog.com, where I write about the New York Mets baseball team, and where I have been writing for six years, and where I have developed a relationship with my 30,000 readers, who know me, and I know them… they know I overuse commas, like this; they know I occasionally misspell a word; they know I use vague sourcing, saying things like, ‘The buzz from baseball,’ or, ‘From what I can gather,’ instead of citing a specific person or source for information.
But, you don’t know me. You may not know that I write fast, and loose, and that I often develop my thesis on the go… And, that’s the thing, writing for the web isn’t so much about form, structure and grammar and rules you learned in English 101.
Instead, it’s about credibility.
That’s it.
Believe me, or don’t believe me… it’s up to you.
Sure, form, structure and grammar can help build credibility, because a new reader is more likely to take a new writer more seriously if her writing appears professional. But, if he is writing crazy things, or making unreasonable accusations, the look and structure of the post will not matter, the writer will still come across as crazy, unbelievable and not credible, and he will lose his reader.
The writer has to be believable and authentic… not perfect.
This drives traditional journalists nuts, and it must scare them to death.
Because, somewhere, right now, there is some teenager who doesn’t even know what AP Style means… but, his dad is friends with someone who works for the New York Yankees, who spills secrets and inside information about trades and free agents to sound important… and, where as 10 years ago that teenager could only use that information to impress his friends, that teenager now has a blog, and I can read it, you can read it, and so can thousands of other baseball fans.
Now, if that teenager is always accurate, if he’s always believable, if he’s authentic and I trust him, does it really matter if he knows the AP Style Guideline for how to abbreviate Conn., or when not to use a comma in a string of items and when to use a semicolon?
Sure, it’s easier to read, and it looks nice, and it can help him seem more professional, but I know plenty of professional journalists who have impeccable copy editors and I believe nothing they write, they were boring, and so I stopped reading what they had to say.
The anonymous teenager wrote thier instead of their, but he was correct saying the Yankees would sign free-agent Mark Teixeira, he was passionate, and he is believable, and, in the end, that’s all that matters… and so I keep going to his blog.
