The FT has a take on blogs today that is self-serving but interesting:
Suddenly, after a prolonged drought, fresh money is pouring into US digital news. The strange thing is where it is going.
Instead of mass market publications – the online equivalent of newspapers or network television – it is being directed to elite start-ups whose editors prefer hard-nosed analysis of data to splashy headlines. The “wonk bubble”, as the blogger Felix Salmon calls it, has captured the imagination, and the investment dollars, of Silicon Valley founders and new media companies.
…Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and a partner in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, argues that news could grow “100 times bigger” and muses: “Maybe we are entering into a new golden age of journalism and we just haven’t realised it yet.”
Anything is possible but the vogue for data analysis is aimed at a select group of readers, refreshing though that is after years in which most online sites attempted to draw the widest possible audience with gossip, celebrity coverage and juicy headlines. There is nothing wrong with a niche but it is not the entire news market.
…But the new entrants make it harder for themselves in two ways. First, they offer a smaller spread of information even than publications that are already selective. It is as if the graphics and analysis desks of a paper broke off from the news and comment. Vox calls its mission to “explain the news”, which assumes that the readers already know it.
…Second, they are free. Before the internet the extreme ends of the news market were occupied by the tabloids, which were cheap, and specialist newsletters, which were expensive. The mass market was mostly funded by advertising while publications with tiny audiences relied on subscriptions.
I’ve a few points to add. Blogs are far more influential than the writer suggests. MB is a case in point. It has had a huge impact on Australian business media:
- it has forced the use of charts into the mainstream. Chart usage remains ham-fisted but it is still a significant change. It is the privileging of evidence-based debate and, as it spreads, readers will expect more not less of it. Thus the market of ideas will itself over time demand more vigorous argument;
- it is shaping business and economic comment. The most common complaint we get at MB from other authors is that we “personalise” our meta-commentary. That’s a self-centered view. MB holds writers to account for their copy. As a result, many commentators have lifted their game and shifted their views towards reality. It’s certainly true that spruikers are far more shy than they used to be;
- MB material is plagiarised daily. We don’t mind given the practice disseminates good ideas and argument and lifts the quality of debate (though a few more links would be nice);
- frank and fearless blogging pushes back the acceptable boundaries of mainstream debate because any given idea has been explored in the public domain already, leaving MSM commentators, who are basically rubber stamps for consensus, a broader playing field, and
- Fairfax’s Business Day has been gutted and redesigned as a MB clone (albeit bloodless).
And that’s only locally. Internationally, MB is linked in New York and London every night and read by the power brokers of global finance.
The final riposte is that in terms of valuable business niches, blogs are already sizeable and growing very fast:
None of this necessarily proves a successful business model. But such a level of influence creates its own market and making the assumption that the very best available media in the world will have to remain free, or be unable to compete on anything other than the number of eyeballs, is the kind of incumbent complacency that any entrepreneur would lick his lips at.
