BLENDLE: The creativity in journalism
According to the specialists “there is no parthenogenesis in art”. Does this dictum also apply to the journalism? Is there parthenogenesis in journalism?
It is truth that a writer or a journalist usually writes or creates his work based on the experiences he has suffered, the books he has read, the music he has heard or the pictures he has seen. And as far as it concerns the idea behind the journalism, the concept upon which the journalism is built, the things become even more difficult. It isn’t art or culture anymore. It is just business. But even there the idea of parthenogenesis is not unknown. The constructor creates business plans based on ideas that he has already seen or experienced.
But, not always. The last few years this “custom” has started changing. The new generation of journalism is based upon new, unique and creative ideas of entrepreneurship. Ideas that make us think that maybe we can talk about parthenogenesis in journalism. One of these ideas is the “BLENDLE”, the Dutch initiative that was created in the purpose of highlighting the worth of the qualitative journalism.
The Blendle is an original journalistic startup project, born -almost two years ago- in Netherlands by two young inspired men, Alexander Klöpping and Marten Blankesteijn. Those two young men had the ambitious goal of creating an online platform, through which the reader could have the “the best user experience possible for journalism”. An experience that would offer the reader the feeling of a real newspaper or a real magazine on his screen, instead of his hands. Certainly, the principal novelty of this whole project was the idea that each reader has to pay for every article he reads, but only for this. And if he doesn’t like it, he has the possibility of a refund.
Somebody could claim that -in the years of the free internet and the free online content- this project would be a total failure. In a world and an era, where everything -particularly the journalistic content- is offered free of charge, who would pay for a single article? But, despite all the predictions, Blendle literally overcame all the expectations reaching -in the first year of its function- the impressive number of 250.000 users in Netherlands. At the same time, in the first six months, the New York Times and the German colossus, Alex Springer, invested the incredible amount of 3 million Euros in stocks. An investment that helped Blendle to open its wings to other countries and continents. Therefore, after almost two years of functioning, Blendle has already been “distributed” in Germany and is ready to be launched in USA, where it has already signed agreements with journalistic “lords” such as The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the New York Times.
In my point of you, the special offer of this innovation in the journalistic world is that it maintains some special characteristics of the traditional media, such as the beauty of browsing a newspaper, while at the same time it suggests a new business model, in order to face the crisis of the media world, such as the low quality of the content, the rise of the clickbaits and the extreme use of advertisements. It doesn’t focus on the easy money, but on the qualitative journalism, the proper information of the public, the promotion of the value of the journalistic work and the importance of the payment for a good content.
In its first steps in the new media world, Blendle has already proved that it has all the guarantees for a successful outcome. Having still long way to go and a high target to succeed, Blendle demonstrated to everyone that originality not only exists in journalism, but it also gives to it a special meaning and substance. Originality transforms journalism to something new, something different and familiar at the same time. Is it parthenogenesis? Maybe yes maybe not. For sure it is creation.
