E-Media Tidbits

ABC.com ABC flubbed its official blog for "The Path to 9/11," which starts airing tonight.

The first part of ABC's controversial docudrama, The Path to 9/11, airs tonight. The blog that ABC launched for this show represents a huge missed opportunity, I think.

What's wrong with this blog? First of all, there's not much there. As of today, there are only eight postings total on that blog. Seems dreadfully light for such a high-profile project.

The bigger problem is clueless content. The very first posting (Aug. 11) was a straight-out marketing blurb. However, since people were hungry for an opportunity to converse with ABC about this show, even that lame debut posting drew 54 comments. ABC staff responded only twice, in a brief and tightly constrained manner. Later postings adopted a generally defensive, guarded tone.

Now you see it, now you don't: ThinkProgress reported that on Sept. 3 this blog went missing. During that time, the blog's URL redirected to the show's homepage. It's unclear whether ABC pulled the blog or whether there was a technical problem, but the absence was conspicuous. Also, Webloggin noted another strange content juggling incident on the blog.

Apparently ABC reinstated the blog on Sept. 5, without acknowledgment or explanation of the gap. Like no one in the blogosphere was going to notice?

It's a good thing ABC decided to reinstate missing content in both cases, because in both cases bloggers critical of ABC had cached and republished what had gone missing from the blog. (Yet another reason to handle content changes and updates with care on blogs.)

One thing is for certain: In entertainment media (and ABC appears to be positioning this show as entertainment, not news or journalism), all publicity is good publicity. Controversy draws viewers.

Had ABC made a good-faith effort to engage the public in a frank, rich, thoughtful conversation on this topic, this blog might have drawn more supportive comments. Even more importantly, it could have leveraged blog-based conversation to attract viewers. What a shame.