The Modern Journalist

Ad Age: Death of Bloggers

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In the interest of fairness, my perspective on technology and the news is skewed because I first got online in 1984 and I didn’t start writing professionally for another 10 years. I spent my formative years tooling around on networks and such for most of my childhood.

I’m writing this because it’s important for me to convey that I’m not someone who thinks all old journalists should be taken out behind the shed and shot. I don’t. My mentors are those old journalists. But I’m also not of the opinion that just because you’ve been doing something for a long time that it qualifies you to lead in a new age.

It’s the Silicon Valley quandary: young tech heads build start-ups that blow into the stratosphere, have no idea how to run a business and then battle with venture capitalists for control of their company as the money folks try to install more traditional businesses.

When the dotcom “crash” hit in 2001, I had been working for Wired and Wired News for a few years. I was smack-dab in the middle of the whole mess, writing about it every day. Since then, I’ve been trying to explain to people that the “crash” that people spoke about wasn’t a crash at all. That decade-or-so year period of innovation fundamentally altered near every aspect of our lives. Sure, some ill-conceived companies went out of businesses, but overall, that was the most successful crash of all time.

The lesson: There is a forest and there are trees. Do not mistake them.

Which brings me to my real point: Keeping up with social media and emerging technologies may be overwhelming. Some of these may even crash and burn. That has nothing to do with why we’ve already seen a transformative effect on society.

There’s a post in Advertising Age, From Media Darlings to Public Enemy #1 in Five Years or Less, that got me thinking about my days covering entertainment start-ups in the valley.

The piece focuses on Internet celebrity blogging and the media’s fascination with it, which has always confused me to no end (other than it’s easy for people who have no idea what happens online to do a quick search, find Michael Arrington and assume he is “the voice” for the tech crowd).

The central thesis: The days of the popular cele-blogger are numbered because like Gawker founding blogger Elizabeth Spiers (who I met a few years back and truthfully have a little crush on), the best ones move on to more mainstream publishing gigs.

The article, though, is a bit like celebrating the dotcom crash as the end of the digital economy.

I’m one of the nameless cyber-hounds out there, but I’d like to think that my days surfing the Bullet Board Systems, Gopher, the newsgroups and using QuantumLink and CompuServe and first attending and then participating as an Advisory Board member with South by Southwest Interactive and working with Wired, Wired News and Technology Review have kept me relatively dialed into what happens — at least partially — in cyberspace.

Yet I’d never heard of Arrington or Robert Scoble or Nick Denton — or a host of other folks who apparently are very big names online. Why? My cyberworld took me to different places that I found more interesting for my tastes. Of course, I’ve grown to enjoy Arrington, Scoble and Denton — and others — but their participation in the conversation online is no more a bell weather test for the state of blogging than Riffage closing was for the state of digital music.

My point isn’t to disparage any of the cele-bloggers because everyone finds their own niche, whatever that may be, and goes with it. That’s the beautiful nature of a decentralized and networked communication medium.

It’s also why it’s impossible to generalize a state of the blogosphere and the media’s fascination with it. Even if the traditional media stopped writing about Spiers and other bloggers, it wouldn’t have any effect on the sphere itself because it exists outside of traditional outlets.

Whether others outside of each individual’s sphere pay attention isn’t really the point.

To paraphrase David Letterman: Forrest. Trees. Trees. Forrest.