Jun 22nd, 2008 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
For quite awhile now, I’ve been writing most of my blog posts — about media, technology, business and anything else that captures my fancy — at my main blog (mathewingram.com/work), and then cross-posting the ones that were more media-focused manually to this blog. I thought that made sense for readers who only wanted the media-focused posts, but increasingly it has become hard to judge which ones are media and which ones are tech, and on top of that, it’s just a gigantic pain to cross-post things. So I’ve decided to consolidate things at my main blog — and as my friend and fellow media blogger Jason Preston mentioned, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of just the posts from the “media” category there, which accomplishes the same thing. Or you can just subscribe to the main RSS feed.
May 12th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
I wasn’t going to jump into this one, mostly because it seemed kind of “inside baseball” (i.e., not that interesting to lots of people), but as we all know one of the main things the blogosphere likes to do is blog about blogging, so I thought I would take a crack at the Ars Technica brouhaha. Exhibit A is MG Siegler’s post at ParisLemon about what he calls “another classic rip off” by Ars Technica. You can read the post if you need to catch up on the details, but basically MG is saying that the site rewrote his post and never gave him credit for the idea.
This isn’t the first time that Ars has had such allegations leveled at it. As Cynthia Brumfield writes at IPDemocracy, an incident involving a link to one of her posts occurred back in 2006 and has even made it into the Wikipedia entry on Ars. In the comments on her latest post, Ars writer Nate Anderson takes issue with Cynthia’s characterization of events, however, saying it was a mistake that was corrected quickly and that she should have tried to contact someone at Ars before she flamed them in a post. In a response, Cynthia said that she had heard from many others who had had similar experiences.
In the interest of balance, I emailed Ars founder Ken Fisher to ask him for a comment on the allegations, and he said that in the case of IPDemocracy, it was a simple mistake in which “the link got removed accidentally in the editing phase,” that it was fixed as quickly as possible and that there was “no intent to deceive.” As for MG Siegler’s post, he said that Siegler wasn’t the only blog to make the comparison between the iPhone and the game of Risk (this blog also did) and that therefore he didn’t deserve a link. In any case, he said, Ars didn’t see Siegler’s post and wrote its own version at about the same time (the site said it was published later because editors were busy).
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Apr 15th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
While watching the Twitter posts fly by last night, I saw some from Robert Scoble (of course) talking about advertising, and suggesting to Twitter founder Ev Williams that he be allowed to share in the revenue from ads on the group IM service. Oh, I thought — is Twitter finally launching ads? Then came a post at TechCrunch that said it was. Or was it? Apparently not, according to Silicon Alley Insider, which emailed Biz Stone at Twitter and got a denial that any such plans were in the works.
As it turned out, a background image from Chinese Business Network blogger Christine Lu’s profile pic on Twitter popped up in a yellow box somehow, which made it look like an ad for the network, as she explained in a comment on the TechCrunch post. In other words, no story, right? Except that Duncan Riley of TechCrunch said in a subsequent comment that “ads are coming, it’s just a matter of when.” As more than one person has pointed out, however — including Frederic at The Last Podcast — this assertion comes without any real facts to back it up.
Nate Westheimer, a contributor to Silicon Alley Insider, also has a curious blog post in which he laments the state of blogging, which he says doesn’t pay enough attention to accuracy, and he uses Duncan’s post as an example. Which is fair enough, of course — except that Nate’s post is riddled with errors, including two different spellings of Duncan’s last name and a couple of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Fair enough, you might say — as Nate points out in a comment, he isn’t really a reporter. So is Duncan a reporter? Well, maybe he is and maybe he isn’t.
Duncan and I have had our differences in the past, but I’m not here to beat up on him for the Twitter story. Should he have run with it based on what turned out to be very little factual information? I don’t see why not — but I think it should have been updated later, as others have. Nate says that this shows “the importance of journalistic standards, especially that of using reliable sources and having a standard for truth.” I’m not going to argue with that — having editors is a great thing (mostly). But journalism is about speed as well. It’s a classic battle between going with the story because you’re out of time, and checking one more source or fact.
This isn’t something the blogosphere invented — wire services like Reuters and Associated Press have been operating this way for decades. Report something as quickly as possible, then fix the mistakes later. It’s when the mistakes don’t get fixed that we have something to worry about, and as Thord Daniel Hedengren reminds us, we could all probably do better at that — regardless of what we call ourselves.
Apr 7th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
Although I’m pretty sure his post is intended as advice for marketing people and that sort, I think Seth Godin has some great advice in his post on how to “Write Like a Blogger.” In it he provides a short list of tips for writing effectively for an audience. To me, these suggestions make sense for anyone, but especially for journalists who are trying to wrap their heads around this whole social media thing. Among my favourites:
– Use headlines: Not just boring ones that announce your purpose, but interesting or puzzling or engaging headlines. Headlines are perfect for engaging busy readers.
– It’s okay if you leave: Bloggers aren’t afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you’ll come back if what we had to say was interesting.
– Show up: Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
Read the rest of the list here.
Mar 28th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
In a piece posted at the New York Times’ Bits blog, Saul Hansell pits Mike Arrington’s “vision of blogging’s future” against that of PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. One is personal and filled with lots of emotion (guess which one) and the other is more analytical and has more traditional journalistic integrity, at least according to PaidContent’s new CEO. Rafat quite freely admits that his model has very little to do with the rough-and-tumble of the blogosphere and more to do with the large trade publishers like Reed Elsevier and Informa, which cover industries like a blanket but don’t get into pissing matches about personalities.
I have nothing but respect for what Rafat and his team have built. He and Staci and the rest have doggedly pursued their model, and they have covered the media business within an inch of its life, and they should be congratulated for that. I think Rafat is totally right when he says he is going after the big trade publishers, and I have no doubt that one or the other of them will eventually come to their senses and just buy the operation outright, or Rafat might just buy them.
But I also find that PaidContent.org isn’t that… well, interesting. If I were a mid-level media executive, trying to figure out where the next layoffs were coming from, or who was rising up the ranks of whichever entity, then I might read it for information purposes. But it doesn’t have much in the way of colour to it — and to be fair, Rafat has never made any secret of the fact that colour isn’t what he’s after. I also notice that while PaidContent is set up like a blog, with comments and everything, there aren’t a whole lot of comments on the stories I read.
To me, however, part of the power that blogs have is that they are personal and direct, that they give you a connection of some kind to a person (or people, in the case of a blog like Gawker), and that they have a voice that either interests or amuses or enrages you. PaidContent doesn’t have that for me — it is pure information. That’s why it commands triple-digit CPM rates for its ads, no doubt. But while I wish Rafat and the rest of the team all the best, and I think they are doing a heck of a job, I hope that not all blogs are going to become just trade press in another form.
