Atrios says he’s “always been puzzled by the fact that alt-weeklies have largely missed the blogging boat.” I don’t quite understand it, either. I don’t know how things work at the Houston Press, but like Atrios I’ve long thought that they’d be ideally set up to do the kind of quick-hit reporting and commentary that would make for some compelling blogs, yet they’ve never even dipped a toe in the water. The same is true for the Austin Chronicle, which saw both the Statesman and the Observer jump on the Lege-watch blog train but never flinched themselves – if anything, their attitude towards blogging (scroll to the bottom) seems especially harsh towards the form, much more so than the dailies. Same no-blogging story at the Dallas Observer and San Antonio Current, too.
Maybe they don’t have the workforce, maybe they don’t think the ad revenue would be worth it, or maybe they don’t feel any pressure to change what they’re doing, I don’t know. I do know that I’d be quite interested in knowing what their thought processes are on the matter. Four of the five major dailies (the Star-Telegram being the exception, as far as I know) have some resources devoted to blogging. Why is there no hint of this at the weekly level?