IP Democracy: Arrington: Mainstream Press No Longer Matters

(San Jose, CA) Blogging is big, but has the mainstream press already slipped into obsolescence? Phenomenally successful blogger Mike Arrington of TechCrunch thinks so, a contention that sparked a few eye rolls among fellow top bloggers at a panel devoted to blogging here at VON 07.

By the time a story reaches the mainstream media, it’s already dead, the entertaining and colorful Arrington said. “It’s sort of a nice record for what happened, but it’s totally dead.”

He reiterated his view after Andy Abramson mentioned a scoop that he posted on his blog regarding layoffs at Level 3, a big piece of news that was then picked up by The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News. Arrington challenged Abramson about why he even mentioned these top newspapers. “You’re buying into the old mentality,” he said. “Who cares what an editor at the mainstream news thinks?”

PR pro Abramson didn’t buy into Arrington’s view. “The whole world is unfortunately not online yet,” he said in defending the continued importance of mainstream news outlets.

Even if blogs haven’t eclipsed traditional newspapers in importance, it’s clear that the blogosphere is changing the rules of the journalism business. For one thing, bloggers typically beat traditional print journalists in breaking news. Arrington cited Gabe Rivera’s great TechMeme to illustrate this point. “Techmeme is a site that watches thousands of blogs and watches who links to each other and creates headlines out of it. Almost a full day in advance, Techmeme knows what’s going on.”

If the bloggers on this panel are any indication, successful bloggers toil round-the-clock on their publications. Videoblogger Steve Garfield said he blogs “24-7.” Arrington said he blogs 12 to 16 hours per day. While Robert Scoble may not put in these kind of hours writing or videoblogging, he claimed to read 600 blogs a night in order to stay up to speed (to which Arrington responded: “You are such a liar. There’s no way you’re reading 600 blogs a night.”)

This kind of workaholism is probably not a prerequisite to success in blogging, but commitment and consistency are. Jeff Pulver said passion matters but consistency matters just as much. “It’s easy to start, but if you want to be meaningful, you really need to be out there on a regular basis.”

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on March 21, 2007 10:27 PM to IP Democracy