Mar 27th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
I don’t like to pick on a colleague from the Globe and Mail, but in Russell Smith’s case I’m willing to make an exception. I like Russell, and I know he enjoys playing the curmudgeon — in fact, I think he would make a pretty good blogger. But in his latest column I think he goes for the facile, blog-bashing argument because, well… it’s easy. In the piece, which is entitled “Way more news sites, way less news,” he looks at the recent report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism which looked at the state of the news media in the U.S. and compared the number of unique news stories both in print and online in various forms, including blogs. One of the comments from the study is:
“News consumers may have had more choices than ever for where to find news in 2007, but that does not mean they had more news to choose from. The news agenda for the year was, in fact, quite narrow, dominated by a few major general topic areas.”
Russell uses this as a stick with which to beat the Web and particularly the blogosphere, saying blogs and websites focus on only a few stories and blow them out of proportion, and also that sites such as Digg (which the report barely mentions) accelerate this process. He says the report showed that “more than a quarter of the news stories on television and online last year in the United States were about the Iraq war and the presidential campaign” and says that
“this kind of concentration of attention runs against what was expected of the kind of information universe the Web would provide. What we expected, 10 years ago, was a wild diversity, a babble of voices bringing light to the stories that the supposedly stodgy, politics-and-economics-obsessed newspaper newsrooms were not connected to.”
I’m not sure who expected that (other than maybe Russell). In any case, is he saying that TV and news websites shouldn’t have focused on the Iraq war and the presidential campaign? Surely those were a couple of pretty important topics. Russell goes on to say that instead of the wonderful diversity that we expected from the Web, “what we’ve ended up with is a million sources reporting the same story.”
Two things about that: 1) Lots of the blogs and websites writing about those topics aren’t reporting them at all, they’re analyzing and commenting on them (people might take issue with that, but it’s a separate argument from the one Russell is advancing; and 2) What do plenty of newspapers do? Run the same set of a dozen or so newswire stories or press releases to fill out their pages — and often get them wrong, as Tim Burden notes in his post. How is that any different? Most of the report’s criticisms seem to extend primarily to cable television, rather than online, but Russell has his axe and he’s apparently determined to grind it.
Mar 19th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
Mike Arrington has a lengthy post at TechCrunch about the evolution of the blogosphere — a topic he launches into with a roundup of some of the financing rumours that are swirling around properties like Silicon Alley Insider and PaidContent, both of which are reportedly looking for several million dollars. Both of those sites are also excellent examples of blog evolution in action: PaidContent.org started with Rafat Ali and has become a media entity that I would argue rivals any business magazine, and SIA began with Henry “I used to be a famous Wall Street analyst” Blodget and has also become a force to be reckoned with.
I think PaidContent and Silicon Alley have set themselves apart primarily by writing excellent content, and focusing their efforts instead of trying to be all things to all people. Although Mike doesn’t mention Gawker (likely because he despises founder Nick Denton, who is the Darth Vader to Mike’s Obi-wan Kenobi), blogs like Gawker.com, Engadget — and yes, even Valleywag — have become success stories by doing the same thing, although in their case it’s more of a tabloid-style approach that takes advantage of controversy just as much as it does good content.
Mike makes the point that the blogs that are raising money now might be making a mistake, in part because the good old days of being able to build a blog empire with nothing but a few computers and some writing ability are largely gone — now, writers want to be paid a decent salary (imagine!) and then there’s the whole VC snakepit to navigate. And he also mentions how competitive and political the blogosphere has become, with pitched battles and people taking sides, and describes how he has tried to help B-list and C-list bloggers (including yours truly) by linking.
I appreciate Mike’s take on things, and the fact that he sees me as one of the “non-crazy influencers” (although I have criticized his point of view before, as many people know, and am more than willing to do so in the future if I think he is wrong on something). And as much as I would like to pretend that it isn’t a competitive game, there’s no question that it is. Are the good old days gone forever? Are we now where the Wild West was when the developers and the settlers and the banks took over and the gunslingers were put out to pasture? Perhaps.
Towards the end of his post, Mike suggests that he has a bigger picture in mind when he advises some of the other bloggers not to take investment money — he talks about how he would like to see the creation of a blogging “Dream Team” that could take on CNET (not really that difficult a task, I would argue). I for one would like to see that happen, mostly because I think it could be a lot of fun to watch, or even to take part in. And if it comes to that, I want to be Magic Johnson 
Feb 20th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
If you follow the media business at all, you might have heard of Chez Pazienza — a CNN producer who was fired recently for having a blog. This isn’t that uncommon, sadly. In fact, it even has its own term: getting fired for your blog is called getting Dooced, after a blog of the same name got Heather Armstrong fired way back in 2002. So what happened to Chez is hardly unique. But for some reason it seems even more pathetic for something like this to happen to someone in the media — since blogs are effectively just another medium, one you might hope outlets like CNN would be experimenting with.
Heather Armstrong got fired for writing satirical blog posts about a place she worked. Why did Chez Pazienzia get fired? That’s not really clear. If you read his lengthy update about the situation — which I encourage you to do — he says it was made pretty obvious that while his blog technically broke the rules (which require that all outside writing be pre-approved by the network), the real reason he was fired was what he was writing about, i.e. the content of some of his blog posts.
It’s still not clear what was wrong with that content, however, other than the fact that he spoke his mind about various aspects of pop culture, the media, and occasionally political issues as well. I suspect it was when his posts started showing up at The Huffington Post (where some of mine also appear from time to time) that certain eyebrows started to be raised at CNN. But even that was never explicitly mentioned when he was given his walking papers. He was just shown the door.
As a blogger who also has a day job with a large media entity, I’m somewhat, er… sensitive to these issues, shall we say. I try to keep the things I write about on this blog focused on my beat, which is technology and new media, and when I stray from that I keep in mind that to some extent I represent the Globe and Mail and that they sign my pay cheques. That said, I think what CNN did to Chez Pazienza was pretty stupid. From reading his blog posts, he seems like a passionate guy, and a pretty smart guy as well. Isn’t that the kind of staffer they want?
Maybe he wrote some things that crossed the line into partisan ideology, things that CNN thought might make people question his ability to be fair or balanced as a producer. Or maybe he wrote some posts that the network thought made it look bad, by criticizing the popular media coverage of some issue. Either way, why not just go to him and ask him to tone it down a little? As far as I can tell, there’s no indication that anyone did that. And now, CNN just looks like a bully, and a stupid one at that.
Feb 18th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
I know there’s probably been enough sturm und drang about Fred Wilson’s post on journabloggers and Mike Arrington’s response, in which he calls Fred “hypocritical, wrong and conflicted,” but there’s an undercurrent behind the furore that I’ve been thinking about a fair bit. Tony Hung puts his finger on it in this post, and Andy Beard mentions it in his as well. It’s the old “truth vs. traffic” dilemma, and while bloggers like to think that it was invented by the Web, it’s probably as old as journalism itself.
To recap: Tony says that Mike is using a blog/nerd fight to his advantage for traffic reasons, and that when TechCrunch or any other blog is controversial, they win (i.e., they get linked high on Techmeme and they get more traffic as a result). Mike also says in a comment on his own post that:
“we’ve found that the “hits” - the blog posts that generate a lot of discussion - are the ones that drive all stats, including, indirectly, monetization. The problem is knowing what’s a hit and what isn’t before it actually happens.”
and in a comment on Fred’s post:
“here’s a secret - a lot of what we write about generates the traffic. And every day I sneak in a bunch of posts about startups that get the benefit of that traffic.”
Mike also told me last year — when I interviewed him as part of a mesh conference keynote — that he always wants to be first, because if he’s not first then “it’s a lot more work.” Does that mean he is willing to jump into print with something quickly even if he hasn’t pinned it down 100 per cent? He admitted that it does (although he also made the point that trust must be gained over time, and can be easily lost).
But in making that admission, and talking about traffic as a motivator, all Mike is really doing is admitting to the same impulse that newspaper editors have been driven by for the past 100 years or so. In fact, the early days of newspapers — when there were hundreds of scandal sheets and political bully-pulpit rags pushing their respective biases — resembled nothing so much as the current state of the blogosphere.
That tradition continues today with tabloids like the New York Post and the Daily Mail in the UK, and with blogs like TMZ and PerezHilton.com. Got a hot rumour? Print it first, ask questions later. Even reputable newspapers can fall prey to that impulse: I remember a story that hit the front pages of dozens of British papers (as well as my own paper) about a guy who made custom wooden gibbets for hanging prisoners, and claimed to have sold them to various African despots.
It was a great story — except that it turned out to be complete fiction. Did we or the other papers check it out before printing it? Sure. But maybe we didn’t check quite as hard as we might have, because it was such a great story. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not comparing Mike Arrington to a tabloid or a scandal sheet or anything of the sort. I’m just saying that the quest for traffic, and the tension between that and “the truth,” is not a new one invented by the blogosphere. It goes on all around us.
Feb 14th, 2008 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
It hasn’t gotten a lot of notice, but Richard MacManus has a post up at Read/Write Web that I thought was pretty interesting, about an email he got from Business Wire, in which the press release service brags about its ability to bypass the blogosphere and traditional media and go directly to the markets it is trying to reach, by showing up on Techmeme and other aggregators, as well as in search results.
This may sound like a lot of hot air from a PR service, but as Richard notes in the post, there is ample evidence of press releases showing up at the top of conversation threads on Techmeme. Richard also has some quotes from Gabe Rivera, in which he talks about how that isn’t necessarily a bad thing — provided they are well written — and how some blog posts amount to poorly rewritten press releases anyway.
It was that last point that really struck me. Why shouldn’t press releases get better play than some blog post that basically takes the key facts and repeats them? If a press release gets across the information and has it first, then it deserves to be there — and as Richard notes, as press releases get more “social” and add links and even video, they become more like blog posts, and are even more likely to hit Techmeme.
Memo to the blogosphere: You might want to keep all that in mind the next time you try to get some juice out of posting a rewritten press release. That kind of thing works in traditional media, but it’s probably not going to fly for very long in new media.
