If you saw Time’s Blog Index, in which one of the world’s most traditional magazines tries to demonstrate that it understands the internet, you already know this, but wow, they have a few things to learn about the internet.
Most importantly, Time needs to figure out that people who read blogs don’t consider blogs overwhelmingly stupid, or they wouldn’t read them, so it’s not necessary to issue periodic reminders that you are smart enough to know that blogs are stupid and you don’t really take them seriously. All of the following observations can be found in a piece that is allegedly about good blogs:
- “Lifehacker [is] one of the few truly — gasp — useful blogs on the net.” Now, I love Lifehacker. Lifehacker is a terrific blog. But there’s nothing “gasp” about a blog being useful. Being entertained is useful. Hearing stories told by people you’d otherwise have no way to hear from is useful. It’s like they didn’t think it was enough to say Lifehacker was useful; it was important to make the point that blogs are not useful, that they are slumming by reviewing them, and that they don’t really expect you to respect what any of these blogs are doing, except in relative terms.
- “The typical blog is written by one person wearing sweatpants reclaimed from the hamper.” Oh my God, seriously? Are there still people who think this, or who think it’s relevant? Is there someone who believes that sitting in an office in a tie has ever been good for creative content? Are there still people who think that there’s something about going into a big steel and glass building and attending meetings between trips to Starbucks that makes you more creative, innovative, serious, or worthwhile? That is insane. That is the opposite of true. I think we’ve outgrown sweatpants as a critique of what anyone contributes to the culture. Shame on them; this ossified cheap shot never should have made it past any editor who’s gone outside since 2002.
- “The blogosphere is overloaded with folks that write about pretty much whatever pops into their head at the keyboard.” In addition to the fact that I don’t think we’re saying “blogosphere” anymore if we ever were, you know what else is overloaded with people who want to write about whatever pops into their heads? (And yes, “they” have “heads,” and not one head, not that a blog would ever correct a print publication.) Book publishing. Book publishing is full of people who want to write whatever is in their heads, and as with blogs, if you don’t want to read it, you don’t have to. Vanity and navel-gazing were not invented in the 1990s, for God’s sake.
- In praising Gawker: “The formula has proven so adaptable that Denton’s Gawker Media now comprises more than a dozen blogs, each with its own area of meanness (Defamer-LA; Wonkette-Washington D.C., Valleywag-Silicon Valley .)” Aside from the folly of praising the vapid Gawker when it’s one of the weakest in the Gawker Media family and isn’t nearly as interesting as its close celebrity-gossip cousin Defamer, do you suppose Time is unaware that Consumerist and Lifehacker, both mentioned elsewhere in this list and both having nothing to do with gossip or meanness, are both Gawker Media blogs, and that this versatility might be more relevant to a discussion of the empire than rattling off other cities with dumb-ass gossip blogs?
- “BoingBoing is the rare blog that delivers exactly what its customers want.” Yes, blogs are terrible at serving their own customers. That’s why the format is going nowhere. No traffic. Who reads blogs when they never deliver what you want?
There are other questions — is “the decline of Western civilization” really the best punchline they could think of when attacking a target as broad as LOLcats? Do they not understand that there are problems with referring to the name of the Ars Technica blog as “fruity”?
I’m all in favor of print media embracing the internet and trying to guide hesitant readers to great sites — God knows OldTWoP got plenty of traffic as the result of being named on various “Great Sites” lists, including ones that came from Time. I read Time. I like Time. But if you’re going to cover blogs, you cannot do it while holding your nose, trying to simultaneously be of the internet and above it.
This is really the way I feel about pop culture as well — pop culture and the internet are intersecting but separate topics, but “old media” tends to react the same way to both. If there’s coverage, it’s rarely fully engaged, because there’s such intense fear that it will make you seem unserious. That caring about television will make you less serious about politics or music. That caring about the internet means you don’t read. So you wind up with these weird, backhanded-compliment pieces that amount to, “Well, that’s not bad, for the internet.” “That’s not bad, for a TV show.” I’ll tell you what — Lifehacker would stand up against any consumer magazine for sheer helpfulness. The Best Week Ever blog would stand up against any entertainment magazine for both newsy content and the pleasure of consumption.
Any publication that’s not prepared to acknowledge that online writers, as a group, have nothing to apologize for shouldn’t really be trying to review internet sites, because frankly, it suggests that you don’t get it.
14 comments
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April 7, 2008 at 11:51 pm
E.
I think one of the biggest problems the vast majority of print media has is the conflation of professionally written, well researched blogs like Lifehacker and Consumerist vs. the MySpace ramblings of your next-door-neighbor’s 17 year old about how their favorite band totally, like, rocks.
They are both referred to by the blanket term “blog”, and it’s true that they’re both blogs. However, equating the two is like saying my high school newspaper and the sextuple-Pulitzer-winning Washington Post are the same because they are both newspapers. I think that conflation leads to a lot of the goofy “Bloggers write in their pajamas!” nonsense that tends to rear its head when print media write about bloggers.
I also think the conflation makes it easier for print media to ridicule the opinions of anyone writing solely online: Blogosphere is such a patently ridiculous word that for the print media to use it is inherently dismissive. Print journalists, particularly ones who have been in the game for a long time, tend to look down on anything that’s published online, often because it’s not forced to go through the same level of vetting before it’s tossed out to the masses for debate. Not that the vetting process always catches major league cock-ups.
A really interesting (if ridiculously long) example of this is a story the Washington City Paper ran about the rivalry between The Washington Post and washingtonpost.com, and how over a decade into the internet revolution, they’re still having territorial pissing contests to the point that bylines are going to “Washington Post staff writer” and “washingtonpost.com staff writer”. The tales of the sniping between the paper’s Reliable Source column and post.com’s gossip blog is really telling, particularly for the way the print folks look down on the .com kids simply because they’re publishing online instead of on dead trees.
I can’t think of a ton of print publications with interesting online versions whose online arms aren’t almost completely independent from the dead-tree versions. The New York Times seems to be more respectful of online opinon than most, but even still it runs doofy stories like ZOMG Blogging Will Totally Kill You! from time to time.
I’m not sure I really see a solution beyond the platitude of “Improve mutual respect,” but I think at least being able to put a finger on what these problems are is a good first step in getting everyone to calm down and try and work together.
April 8, 2008 at 8:50 am
Patrick
Well put, Linda. One of the easiest targets of snobbery these days is the internet, as if it is one entity with one voice and one ambition.
April 8, 2008 at 9:41 am
Jenn
“The blogosphere is overloaded with folks that write about pretty much whatever pops into their head at the keyboard.”
Nice grammar, [i]Time[/i]. I guess you can snobby or you can be grammatically accurate, but you can’t be both.
April 8, 2008 at 9:42 am
Mertseger
“not that a blog would ever correct a print publication.” Why do that when you can track the strange and often funny ways they correct themselves?
A friend of mine is becoming an editor at the WSJ online site in July. I’ll point him to this post and discussion.
April 8, 2008 at 10:12 am
JennyM
Very well said, and E. also makes a valid point regarding conflation. If the existence of published political screed-type pamphlets doesn’t diminish the legitimacy or importance of the Washington Post, why should the existence of “the MySpace ramblings of your next-door-neighbor’s 17 year old about how their favorite band totally, like, rocks” diminish the legitimacy or importance of professional blogs such as Lifehacker, Consumerist, etc.?
How can it be that “[b]ook publishing is full of people who want to write whatever is in their heads, and as with blogs, if you don’t want to read it, you don’t have to” isn’t painfully obvious? Yet, there you go. The core of the dichotomy seems to be a deep-seated refusal to admit the legitimacy of the internet as a media form, period (to attempt to be, as you say, “of” the internet and yet “above” it). One would suppose that by 2008 the internet would not still be seen as some quaint techie fad, inaccessible and incomprehensible to the masses.
April 8, 2008 at 10:43 am
golfnutbucket
Sometimes I get the idea that people who write for “old media” are in fact doddering old guys who still wear bowties and just actually heard of the internet because their 15 year old grandson just plugged them into it. Since their discovery, they are now experts on the subject since no one else in their age group has logged on to a computer and won’t until the Underwood Five breaks.
April 8, 2008 at 11:11 am
Bunting
Spleen in a similar vein from a Rick Reilly transcript, as reported by Fire Joe Morgan: http://www.firejoemorgan.com/2008/04/most-stuff-sucks.html
It’s like if they say enough times that the internet is bullshit, they can make it true, and print won’t die and they won’t have to adjust.
April 8, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Omar G.
Well, no, golf.
Like any large organization or company, there are people who get it and people who don’t and it becomes very clear in the content produced and how journalists respond to new technologies who does and who doesn’t.
There are some very smart (and even young) people working in old media, but the challenge is to convince people who aren’t particularly rah-rah about new tech that it’s worth the time and effort to learn.
Smart editors are the ones who have stopped trying to fight online and are instead working to harness its power and use it to do better reporting and publishing.
But generalizing traditional media as a bunch of bow-tie-wearing luddites is as bad as Time Magazine looking down its nose at These Intranetz.
April 8, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Linda
I totally agree, Omar. Interestingly, the first really good use I saw of the kind of community conversation that would eventually make blogs popular was in print. The Bulletin Board column in the St. Paul Pioneer Press is essentially a print blog — when it started, you contributed to it by calling up and leaving a message on the answering machine (how low-tech, I know!) which was then transcribed by the editor/curator of the column who decided what to run. And invariably, one person’s contribution about crying at a funeral or whatever would lead to ten more contributions from other people, and it basically looked just like a well-run, well-edited blog with comments. Contributions are now done largely via email — I’m not sure if the answering machine still exists.
See the Bulletin Board here:
http://www.twincities.com/bulletinboard
That was the first place I appeared in print, was when I called something in to Bulletin Board during the 1992 Summer Olympics. (This was ten years before I ever wrote for money — this was even before law school.) I still remember the day it ran in the paper — there used to be a little teaser up at the top corner of the front page of the entertainment section where there would be about twenty words teasing the BB content for the day, and it said, “The bullies (and boneheads) of Barcelona,” and I just about flipped out. I think I went out and bought five copies of the paper for…no reason, really. I had that little teaser FOREVER tacked up to a bulletin board, until it genuinely fell apart.
That was one of the best uses I ever saw of the alleged “new media” idea that one great way to get content is to ask normal people to talk about their lives, and it was an entirely print-based project. It’s not about being print or being online; it’s about being open-minded and smart, and it’s about having a great editor who can sort through “user-generated content” and locate what’s worth hosting.
April 8, 2008 at 5:37 pm
K.
Online publishing is destroying print publishing. In particular, lean online publishers that are built to do that one thing – publish online content – have an insurmountable advantage over the online publishing ventures of print-based media companies, which are (in general) bloated, riddled with turf wars, marginalized within their corporate parent, not to mention massively cost inefficient. So perhaps Time can be forgiven for being all “oh, those wacky sweatpants-clad bloggers and their silly ramblings” if it’s looked at as a desperate response to a desperate situation.
April 9, 2008 at 8:02 am
JennyM
I disagree, K. I (for one) do not believe we will ever go to a truly paperless, online society and don’t believe people will ever stop buying books and magazines. At least not in our lifetimes. I am not so sure how I feel about the prognosis for newspapers, on down the road. But I really don’t believe a media conglomerate like Time Warner, a company that actually touts itself as “the world’s first fully integrated media and communications company” on its own corporate website and owns AOL (lumbering dinosaur though that may be at this point) and a number of other fairly diverse media types, only one of which happens to be the print media arm, should feel particularly threatened by the strength of “new” technology. Certain individuals involved in the publication of Time Magazine itself apparently either don’t “get it” or don’t think the magazine’s readership does, but I think it would be disingenuous in the extreme for them to be claim to be actively threatened by online publishing. Particularly when Time maintains or contributes to a number of active online publishing ventures anyway (Time.com, CNN.com, People.com, etc.).
April 9, 2008 at 8:38 am
Omar G.
Unless you’re talking about individual bloggers, K., online-only publishers/content providers can be just as piss-poor with budget management and cost control.
I seem to remember a lot of online companies going out of business around, oh, say, 2000-2001.
Remember when online banner ad services wouldn’t pay the sites writing for them and disappeared into the night?
Ah, good times…
April 9, 2008 at 9:28 am
Bunting
“Unless you’re talking about individual bloggers, K., online-only publishers/content providers can be just as piss-poor with budget management and cost control.”
Guilty. Heh.
But seriously: right on. If you’re running an online entity of any size, and you want to be taken seriously from a content standpoint, you face the same issues print media does — your infrastructure costs money. Your talent costs money. You have a lawyer; you have multiple servers; you have postage and blah blah what-all. And because there still isn’t concensus as to how to monetize users/traffic (or whatever concensus there is shifts every 2-3 years to a different model), you find yourself having to adjust your own model so you can make a profit…which you still often can’t do.
We’ve come to think of newspapers as a public trust, really, so the conversation is somewhat different, but at the same time, it’s really two conversations — the relative cost of doing business, which sometimes old media doesn’t understand still pertains in the online space (i.e. if you want your site to be worth a damn, you have to spend — you have to pay your talent and you have to market the product); and “journalism” vs. “blogging,” which some old-media folk seem to think mutually exclude one another, when of course they don’t, or don’t have to. Yes, there’s a difference between commentary and investigative reporting, but newspapers and magazines have the former, and writers online can do the latter.
In their pajamas.
April 10, 2008 at 9:49 am
hegellite
I have to agree that I don’t see paper-based books, magazines, or newspapers disappearing anytime soon. Every time they tout new “advances in the e-book field” I think to myself: what the hell kind of “advances” are they making? All these “advances” involve making e-books more pleasant to read, more page-like, more like a REGULAR BOOK, for God’s sake. I could not be less interested in an e-book. I can’t think of any way they would benefit me personally.
Same thing with newspapers and magazines. I can get headlines from online, but when I want to actually read a news story all the way through, I read an actual newspaper or magazine. I think it’s a visceral thing.