Blog Posts & Articles: Are They The Same Thing?

Often when I receive responses to posts I write, people refer to the texts as "articles." Which leads me to wonder whether the word "blog post" and "article" means the same same thing to most people who read material on the Internet. To me, there's a huge difference between what I post to ArtsJournal / chloeveltman.com and the content that magazines and newspapers commission me to write. For one thing, it usually takes me an hour or less to create and publish a blog post, whereas an article can take weeks or even months to research and write. For another, I'm the only "editor" involved in the blogging process, whereas whenever I write a piece for a magazine or newspaper, a whole team of editors, sub-editors and other media people often gets involved. For a third, I pretty much write whatever I want on my blog, whereas to have something published elsewhere involves getting past various gatekeepers.

All of the above differences affect both the content and style of what I write. As such, it feels a bit strange when people writing to me about my blog posts refer to them as "articles." To play devil's advocate for a moment: If readers are genuinely unable to distininguish between a quick, visceral response to the world, and something more detailed and well-thought-out, then is it worth spending all the time and effort writing articles at all?

I'm pretty sure I'm over-intellectualizing this. It's probably just a matter of semantics. Perhaps it's too much to expect readers outside the journalistic process to separate the term "article" from "blog post." The line between the two concepts is blurred after all -- some bloggers do undertake lots of research for their blog postings and agonize over every word. Equally, newspapers and magazines publish many articles that are poorly written and researched.

To me, however, the terms are far from interchangeable. A blog post is all about getting new ideas and news out there in a timely or spontaneous fashion to kick-start conversations. The writing should be as clear and stylish as possible under the the quick turnaround timeframe that goes hand in hand with posting five days a week. And of course facts should be accurate. But beyond a perfuctory breaking news report, an an article is something that one could think of as growing out of a blog post -- a piece of work that involves more long, hard thinking, in-depth and/or wide-ranging interviews and perspectives, and a refined style.

Perhaps one day when blogs become the absolute heart of cultural journalism -- and, dare I say it, when economics make it possible for bloggers to devote themselves 100% to creating content for their blogs -- it may be possible to conflate the terms. For now however, the two terms remain separated in my practice and mind.