Exclusive! The breaking news problem
Ethan Kaplan of blackrimglasses, the Warner Music Group technology shaman and all-around smart guy, has a great post up about the pile-on effect that we all see from time to time on Techmeme, as well as a related problem: the incessant desire for “scoops” and “exclusives” that companies use to play blogs off against each other — using embargos and other cheap parlour tricks to get blogs to parrot whatever marketing slogan happens to come down the pike.
I know that Mike Arrington at TechCrunch and Pete Cashmore at Mashable try hard not to get sucked into that vortex, and I’m sure that Richard MacManus and the gang at Read/Write Web do too, but it’s hard when everyone wants to be first. As Mike said at our mesh conference in May, being first is easier — if you’re not first, then you have to try harder to add value somehow. If you’re first, well… you’re first.
The problem, as Ethan describes in his own inimitable fashion, is that being first hardly matters any more. It’s not like anyone is going to be first for more than a second or two, and then the great tsunami of coverage will descend on the subject until it is obliterated beneath a pile of Techmeme.com posts. As Ethan says:
“It’s like is holding back an immense amount of water pressure then releasing it. In the end, can you tell who the first drop to hit you was? No. You only know that you are wet and uncomfortable.”
Well said. It’s unlikely we will ever get rid of the desire to be first — I think it’s one of the most primal desires of the journalist (and in using that term I include bloggers) — but I hope that more and more people will choose to focus on the issues that need to be talked about, instead of just the latest release of a Facebook/Google/MySpace widget that aggregates Web 2.0 social bookmarking spreadsheets or whatever.
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(On Nov 13th, 2007 at 9:58 pm)
Don’t forget crowdsourced social news sites leveraging the social graph Matt.
Good point though.
Even with the pile on affect, there is still gold to be head for first movers. Who do you think gets linked to for getting the scoop? Predominantly it’s the person who first got the story.
(On Nov 13th, 2007 at 10:02 pm)
I agree, Steve. And like I said, it still pays to be first, and probably always will. But I hope that more and more bloggers will also look for value elsewhere and reward it with the currency of their links.
(On Nov 13th, 2007 at 5:36 am)
Great post Mathew. We really need to stop from time to time and contemplate what exactly we get as scoop and what news we receive embargoed. We often just think that it is something definitely worth coverage if embargoed. And dozens of blogs publish similar reviews 1 minute after the embargo is lifted. And it is often ridiculous how we hunt for the news and break stories: I remember a few months ago a startup complained that an embargoed story we received from them was broken by the WSJ. Is it something such a publication would do?
(On Nov 13th, 2007 at 7:07 am)
Exclusives are the methamphetemine of the world of journalism. They’re addictive, dangerous, and after a while they make people look ugly. Pretty much nobody cares who got there first any more, and linking to the original story happens only with the best or most exclusive stories.
There is a lesson here - instead of concentrating on tiny details and puffing up weak tidbits, journalists should concentrate on truly original in-depth material … which can’t be easily digested and spat out by a linked blog post. This type of in-depth or investigative stuff is going to drive traffic in the future, rather than one-hit single-strand wonders. Easier said than done.