Ann Marie Cox and David Pogue on Blogs
More pablum from the centroid media types about blogging. In this case, David Pogue of the New York Times throwing softballs to Ann Marie Cox, the original Wonkette, who is now firmly enmeshed in mainstream media at Time magazine. My snarky comments are embedded in brackets.
[from Wonkette's Ingredients For A Successful Blog]DP: So what are the ingredients then for a successful blog, apart from being entertaining or snarky?
[Oh, and I thought it had something to do with good writing, or being passionately involved in the topic...]
AMC: I think it's changing. Six months, a year ago, I would have talked about what I think made Wonkette successful and makes Gawker successful, to a certain extent, and other blogs: A strong, defined personality with a sense of humor about themselves. An ability to filter news quickly and to recognize, you know, what is interesting to other people as well as interesting to themselves, and finding the balance between those things.
What I think is changing is that people have now become addicted to the rapid update. You know, the not just 12 times a day; 18 times a day, 24 times a day. And it's almost physically impossible for one person to do that.
And so I think that we're probably going to see that the individual, strong-personality blog is not going to be at the forefront, because group blogs are going to be able to do what people expect of blogs better.
[Again, I thought other factors counted, not just blogging everyone to bits...]
DP: Who are the readers of the blogs? Is it just the BlackBerry crowd? The white-collar coasts?
AMC: I think it's people with time on their hands. People who work at white-collar jobs, have high-bandwidth Internet connections, and aren't expected to produce, you know, widgets on an hourly basis. I think those are the blogveyers.
[What about all the teenagers? The Brazilians? The Chinese? The South Koreans? The mommy bloggers? Are you kidding me?]
DP: Wait till the widget blogs get a hold of these comments.
AMC: Now, I'm not insulting the widget makers. I come from a long, proud line of widget makers. (LAUGHS)
DP: I doubt it. So, blogs are read by this upper--
AMC: Well, they're read by the opinion-elites, if you want to put it that way. Which means that they get written about disproportionately to how much they affect the world.
But because they get written about, they do wind up affecting the world. So--
DP: It's self-fulfilling.
AMC: Yeah.
[Oh, yeah. The echo chamber thing...]
DP: And so what about this thing that blogs are killing newspapers?
AMC: You know, I suspect that The New York Times will never cease to exist. That dinosaur can't be killed. That really would take a meteor, and I don't think blogs are a meteor. They're kind of like a tiny asteroid shower.
But The New York Times is going to have to change. I mean, all major media outlets are going to have to change to meet the demands of people who might, you know, have grown used to some of the things they get from blogs.
[Remember that the New York Times has fired over 100 of its 600 employees at the start of the year as cost-cutting, but, oh yeah, they're always going to be here...]
DP: So: 75,000 new blogs being created a day?
AMC: Yeah, I think that that may be true, but I can personally attest that I probably started, like, five blogs as a joke, as a whim. You know, like, a blog about purses. Or a blog about lipstick. 'Cause it's so easy. Like, why not go in and start a blog, and then it'll die and never be heard from again? So I think that might be a large percentage of the 75,000 blogs being created.
DP: And how many of these people are just blogging for an audience of nobody?
AMC: I mean, they've replaced the family newsletter. You know, desktop publishing did a similar thing for print publications. But are we going to count every person that used Adobe PageMaker to print out their family newsletter as a new publication? No.
[Forget the numbers. It's just people blogging to their family, don't worry. Your job is safe....]
DP: Do you have any big-picture wrapup on the future of blogs?
AMC: I think that the media fascination with it as a force could decline. But, what's kind of neat or inspiring about the blogosphere is that it's very American. The idea that someone could enter into a conversation, you know, based just on having an opinion and an argument. And it's a conversation that includes people who have real power in the world. I mean, that idea is very seductive.
[oh, yeah... it's just a fad, so don't worry. But the conversational thing is cool, even if blogs themselves are anoying, since we can't control them...]
Why do I find it so annoying to hear the mainstream media types talking about the edge? After all, they are so up on what's going on. Who better than they to talk about where it's headed, and what it all means? By all means, don't invite any bloggers into the conversation.
I think the more fundamental challenge to the Times and other papers are the online markets (classifieds, jobs, etc.). Even if readership stayed flat, if revenue tanks...
What would be interesting would be to know what % of the Times' expenses are directly associated with the deep original reportage (vs soft stuff, mgmt, print/delivery, etc.). Because the real question is what kind of model will allow that reporting to happen in the new ecology. I'm not sure that AdWords is going to do it...
Posted by: Bill Seitz | August 05, 2006 at 07:01 AM
I don't disagree that those economic shifts are happening, but the whole tone of the conversation annoyed me, more than their sketchy grasp of economics.
Posted by: Stowe Boyd | August 06, 2006 at 12:19 PM
Calum Chace of 3Cs Ltd say bloggers are everywhere but Long Tail won't end up wagging the media dog - editorial is essential:
Long Tail won't end up wagging the media dog - editorial is essential
Posted by: Newsquoter | October 04, 2006 at 03:20 AM