It Is Easy For Old Media To Play With New Media
This month has proven how easily bloggers become the victim of the tactics of old media.
While trying to be informative and critical it is very easy to grab all the nice pieces of bait the old media use. There have been several examples of journalists playing with the blogosphere.
Surely there were the more positive ones such as TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year, NY Times embracing social bookmarking and more recently the John Edwards Youtube case. But more traditional media have not hesitated to hit either. The WSJ attack on blogs was the most recently hyped anti-blog story.
And there was quite some truth in it.
You could not visit 3 blogs without reading the same story over and over. Every blogger was proud. Some bloggers went further and called all this linkbait. Linkbait, the term I have come to hate in the last weeks.
The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.
More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren’t much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.
Every time an interesting story lands we behave like vultures and all start writing compulsively feeding Technorati and Sphere, Techmeme and TailRank and many other tracker systems. We all want to break the story, have an informative role although we only are the 56th trackback at TechCrunch or GigaOM.
More success is met in purveying opinion and comment
Many bloggers think that one link in the trackback section will bring the traffic, especially when day after day they are featured as copycat.
Why are the majority of blogs downright appalling?
I have to defend my own case here : the reason is not because we are no schooled or born writers.
The reason is because most bloggers have nothing to say.
The popular bloggers are opinionated. And watched… even by old media journalists.
Restrain from writing what everyone already has written about, unless you come with an opinion or follow up.
We try to educate the MSM, maybe we should educate the main stream blogosphere.
Such hostility toward blogs coming from the MSM. What they fail to understand is that the MSM doesn’t do any journalism either. They used to, but those days are long gone. It’s all about tabloid news now.
PoliticalCritic said this on December 29, 2006 5:11 pm
PoliticalCritic, I agree with you but our echo chamber can lead us to the same situation.
There are few good editors and columnists who really dig into journalism and that is our chance. We have editorial freedom, more than any journalist can dream of. Only we can screw up what we are doing and blogging having gone main stream only makes it harder to do so.
We can learn from the hostility, even if it were only to be reminded that we are opinionated.
Franky said this on December 29, 2006 6:06 pm
Good that you take a fair view here. Too much sheep-like behaviour does blogging as a movement no good.
Mosey said this on December 30, 2006 2:44 am