BLOGS VS MAINSTREAM MEDIA…FIGHT!!
Eight years ago, when I was a pretentious, know-it-all 19-year-old, the conversation about new media was dominated by the rhetoric of bloggers and journalists, citizen and mainstream media. I had seen the blogosphere call out Dan Rather for running with forged documents as evidence. I learned of the role they played in making sure Trent Lott’s statements saw the light of day.
As far as I was concerned, newspapers and news outlets in general were old hat on their way to extinction, and blogs were the future.
What did I think this meant?
It meant that newspapers would unbundle. It meant that articles on the Iraq War or science features written by journalists with little background in the subject matter would be replaced by people living in Iraq, and actual scientists, who would have blogs. This wasn’t all in my head–such blogs existed and have only grown more numerous.
My thoughts on whether anyone would make money on this new way of things, and how, went back and forth. But I thought the future looked more like Instapundit and Sandmonkey than like The New York Times and The Washington Post.
As I have witnessed the evolution of the web over the years, aged to a point beyond a number ending in -teen, and followed the conversation and research on new media, my point of view has changed–to say the least.
It’s not simply that it was wrong, but that it was far too narrow. It has not only become clear that professional media, in some form, is here to stay. It has also become clear that the old blog vs mainstream media perspective misses the big picture.
What has happened is that many activities that we conducted in our personal lives have moved online; they have become digital and they have become some approximation of public. This has big implications for other people’s professions–one tiny corner of which is the impact that personal blogs have had on professional media. But it also has an impact on our own professional lives.
In short, the personal and the professional are colliding on a number of fronts. How this collision will play out is an open question.
THE PERSONAL BECOMES PUBLIC
The vast majority of my conversations with nearly all of my friends and family occur in a digital format. It happens on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. It happens in email, in text messages, and in Google Talk chat windows. A very large proportion of this is public or semi-public.
I also enjoy writing about subjects that I’m thinking about. For that reason, I’ve maintained a blog in one form or another since 2004. I have never made one red cent off of my blogging. It has always been something I’ve done out of enjoyment of the writing itself.
Before the Internet, my writing would undoubtedly have been relegated to the handful of friends I could strong-arm into looking at some copies I made for them. I certainly wouldn’t be able to ask this of them on a very regular basis, so most of my writing would have remain unread–or, discouraged, I would have written a lot less.
The thing I enjoyed about blogging from the beginning was that it provided me with a place to put my writing where people could find it, without me having to make the imposition of bringing it to them. However, translating this private analogue activity into a public and digital one has implications beyond this simple convenience.
For one thing, it makes it possible for me to connect with new people who share my interests from anywhere in the world. It can also have implications for my professional life. If I write something insulting about my coworkers, or, say, something extremely racist, odds are it could get me fired and possibly have an impact on my long-term employability.
Conversely, just as I can discover and be discovered by new friends, I can also discover and be discovered by people who might provide me with a career opportunity–and indeed this happened to me earlier this year.
When enough enthusiasts move online in this manner, it begins to have consequences for the world of professional writing in general. One lone guy blogging about a few esoteric subjects isn’t going to have much of an impact. Over 180 million people writing about everything under the sun will have some serious implications. If we take Sturgeon’s Law at face value and say that you can throw 90 percent of that in the garbage, we’re still talking about tens of million of people writing pieces of average to excellent quality.
This is a dramatic expansion in the supply of written works. This has understandably made professional producers of written words sweat more than a little. One way of looking at this is from the old blog vs mainstream media perspective. A better way to look at it is from the understanding that any professional content outlet is going to have to adapt to the new reality of personal production if they want to survive.
That process of adaptation has been messy and is still ongoing.
THE PROFESSIONAL BEGINS TO ADAPT
What my 19-year-old self did not realize is that the media business has never really sold information. It has sold stories, it has sold something for groups to rally around and identify themselves with or against. There is still money to be made by selling this product. Clay Johnson has documented some methods that he finds vile, but there are plenty of perfectly respectable ways to do it as well.
Take The Verge–a technology site that launched last year. It does not suffer from the baggage of a legacy business–it was born online and lives online. It was created by a group writers from Engadget, another professional outlet that was born on the web, who thought they could do better on their own. I have argued that their initial success was made possible in part by the fact that the individual writers had built up a community around them, through their podcast and through their personal Twitter accounts.
The Verge invests a lot in building its community. The content management tools it offers in its forums are, they claim, just as powerful as the tools they themselves use to write posts. They frequently highlight forum posts on their main page. Their writers engage with their readers there and on various social media.
Another way that the professional world has adapted is by treating the group of unpaid individuals producing in their space as a sort of gigantic farm system for talent and fame. This system is filled with simple enthusiasts, but also includes a lot of people consciously trying to make the leap to a career in what they’re currently doing for free. Either way, a tiny fraction of this group will become popular to varying extents. Rather than competing with this subset, many existing professional operations will simply snap these individuals up.
Take Nate Silver, the subject of much attention this election cycle. He started writing about politics in a Daily Kos diary, then launched his own blog on his own domain. Eventually, this was snapped up by The New York Times. The article on this is telling:
In a three-year licensing arrangement, the FiveThirtyEight blog will be folded into NYTimes.com. Mr. Silver, regularly called a statistical wizard for his political projections based on dissections of polling data, will retain all rights to the blog and will continue to run it himself.
In recent years, The Times and other newspapers have tapped into the original, sometimes opinionated voices on the Web by hiring bloggers and in some cases licensing their content. In a similar arrangement, The Times folded the blog Freakonomics into the opinion section of the site in 2007.
Forbes did this with Modeled Behavior; Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish has done this with The Atlantic and now The Daily Beast. In publishing, Crown did this with Scott Sigler, and St. Martin’s Press did this with Amanda Hocking.
Suffice to say, these markets continue to be greatly disrupted. However, I do not think the adapted, matured versions of these markets will involve the utter extinction of professional institutions.
YOU GOT YOUR PROFESSIONAL IN MY PERSONAL
I consider my Twitter account to be extremely personal. No one is paying me to be there. With a handful of exceptions, I don’t have any professional relationships with the people I follow or am followed by there.
But there are definitely people who I feel have followed me because of some notion that it might help their career. Not because I’m some special guy who’s in the know, but because they think, say, that following everyone who seems to talk a lot about social media will somehow vaguely translate into success in a career in that industry. A lot of people who consider Twitter a place for human beings to talk to one another as private individuals have a low opinion of such people.
But I cannot deny that I have, on occasion, used Twitter to my professional advantage. And it’s not as though there’s a line in the sand for any of these services stating FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. It’s difficult for journalists of any kind to treat anything they say in public as something that can be separated from their profession. I have seen some create distinct, explicitly labeled personal Twitter accounts, with protected tweets. Of course, Jeff Jarvis would point out that they are merely creating another kind of public by doing so.
Moreover, more and more services we use in our personal lives are having implications for our employers. How many of us have had an employer ask us to “like” the company page on Facebook? Or share a link to a company press release? These services are far too new for us to have expectations set about them. Is this overstepping the boundaries of what is acceptable, or is this a legitimate professional responsibility we have to our employers?
In a world where a personal project or an answer on Stack Overflow can be added to your resume when applying for a job, the line between personal and professional is not quite as sharp as it used to be.
Take Marginal Revolution as an example. Is it a personal or a professional blog? Certainly Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are not paid to write what they post. But they are using the blog as a venue for participating in the larger conversation of the economics profession. Of course, they also post on any number of specific subjects that catch their interest. It is both a platform to promote their books, as well as to solicit advice from their readers on what restaurants to check out when they are traveling.
Are categories like “personal” or “professional” even useful for describing things like Marginal Revolution? Is it an exceptional case, or–its particular level of popularity set aside–is it the new normal?
