journalism

Bill Wasik makes some interesting observations in response to Nick Carr and George Packer, yet unlike Jaron Lanier Bill just diagnosed the symptoms, not the disease. Bill Wasik writes in Twitter and the Big Blog Dream:

“When people talk about how the Internet is killing the mainstream media, they’re really thinking about blogs, specifically blogs circa 2004. The sudden rise of blogs held out a tantalizing vision of the future, where amateurs would reliably attract an audience to rival that of the mass media. In the Big Blog Dream, there would still be a single media conversation, as it were, but there would be a leveling in that conversation whereby amateurs could join, often as quasi-equals, alongside the professionals.

This is the storyline that still basically dominates discussion of the Internet — and yet the Big Blog Dream has largely died. First, the mainstream media muscled in on it, using their storehouses of experience and talent to launch scores of their own high-traffic blogs. (Where they didn’t build their own, they hired the best amateurs to join their staffs.) Second, the Internet-native media that did survive are now hardly amateur by any definition: they’re places like TPM, Gawker, and the Huffington Post, that have built bare-bones business models that create tons of original content by leveraging young and/or unpaid/low-paid writers. And third, between these two groups (the big-media blogs and the Internet-native blogs), most of the readers no longer have the time or inclination to bother with any actual amateurs. Really, for the past three years or so, there’s been almost no hope for new bloggers who don’t quickly find their way underneath the umbrella of some established site. And so blogging (at least among the non-elderly, as Nick Carr recently pointed out) has come to seem far less vital.”

Everything Bill writes in the preceding paragraphs is true, but this is one of the effects, not the cause, specifically not the cause of the decline in journalism. Google is the God of the Internet. Whats is written on the internet is done to worship and please the Deity. The Google ethos is advertising and this has the far-reaching consequences. Google needs to maximized the inventory of pages to display the ads. The model is the incremental small display ads payments spread over millions of pages. The online content only gravitates in the direction where the monetization model leads it. Hence if you take the Huffington Post (and Gawker for sure) you will find that the quantity trumps quality. Certainly at some point the Huffington Post had the high brow aspirations and there is still plenty of decent content there but overall they moved in the direction where the monetization model leads them, namely a heavy dose of aggregation and the general style of news DJing, instead of the expensive investigative reporting.

The other aspect of the Google worship is that people start writing for a bot, not a human. A computer naturally favors words over coherent sentences. Enter the spam plague of the “affiliate marking”. A “cut & paste” article about a washing machine is more valuable for a bot than a Shakespeare’s sonnet. This encourages the wanton plagiarizing, the mash-ups and devalues an individual authorship. To make matters worse, the anonymity built-in the blog comments by design, degrades the online conversation, even leads to the raging mob and hate. And only then came the Facebook and the Twitter to finish off what was left of the intelligible conversation. So blogs didn’t kill the journalism but the underlying internet advertising monetization model did kill both the traditional journalism and the blogs.