(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 at 10:27 PM | Print | Comments (0)
(San Jose, CA) One of the hottest topics in the Internet arena last year, net neutrality, is now just about one of the most boring ideas. The whole notion of requiring broadband network providers to abide by non-discrimination rules when it comes to IP-based video services and applications, a concept that scuttled major telecom reform legislation last year, has lost its juice, so much so that I had no plans to attend a general session yesterday devoted to the topic here at VON 07.
But, I had lunch with session moderator Blair Levin, a veteran Washington hand who now advises investors at Stifel and Nicolaus, and changed my mind. Blair promised to inject some new ideas into the debate, so I attended.
Blair did his best to enliven the dead topic — to me the highlight of the session was Blair’s very witty slide-show that kicked off the panel — but net neutrality is still a snoozer. No one has said anything new about the debate, added any new wrinkles or advanced the discussion in about six or seven months. And none of the panelists yesterday broke any new ground with one exception.
Rick Whitt, an MCI veteran who is Google’s new Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, set the record straight regarding whether Google has reversed its pro-net neutrality stance, as some reports have suggested. “There’s no strategic change in thinking at all,” Whitt said, although he did add that Google believes the best solution to possible network provider blockage of competitive services is competition in the broadband distribution side of the business, a very long-term solution indeed. “We’re not there anytime soon so that’s why net neutrality seems to be the solution,” Whitt added.
Check out Gigaom’s Paul Kapustka (who has done a great job covering policy issues) for more on yesterday’s panel and Whitt’s public debut in his new role at Google.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 1:18 PM | Print | Comments (1)
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