Slashdot Mirror
Blogs Are Eating Tech Media Alive
Heinz writes with an article in Forbes on how advertising in tech media is drying up and going — where else? — into specialist blogs and Google. "Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech media, there's blood on the floor. Take Red Herring. It hung onto its offices after getting the eviction notice earlier this month. But gossip site Valleywag is breaking story after story not just on its beat — but about its woes. Meanwhile, bigger publications are hurting too: Time Warner's Business 2.0 saw ad pages drop 21.8% through March from the same period a year ago; PC Magazine's editor in chief walked out the door after ad pages fell 38.8% over the same period; and one-time online powerhouse CNET is reporting growing losses even as the companies it covers flourish. It may be happening in tech first, but there's no reason the same thing won't happen, eventually, in every media niche."
Look at Slashdot, they don't need no stinkin' editors.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Anytime I want to research something now, I go to the appropriate forum. There are serious experts available at pretty much all of them. e.g: Want to learn about cellphones: HowardForums.com. Want to find out about military firearms: ar15.com . There's a site for everything.
Blogs are great for some stuff, but forums are just killing the tech magazines, and the special interest stuff.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
If, and I hate to use this term, new media has taught me one thing it's that any press but a journal is horrible for science and technology. Time and time again some reporter is sent out to cover pseudoscience, or thinly disguised ads, as if it was actual technological or scientific news. I'm convinced that watered down reporting, writing to a level that should be insulting to a middle school student, is one of the main causes for the publics ignorance and rejection of science. The public isn't stupid, and they know that the watered down analogies to the library of congress are bullshit. I'm only hoping that the websites that also speak to the public at a five year olds level will follow after and people will will find themselves presented with the actual facts of the matter again.
Everything will be taken away from you.
I've had it enough with mainstream media who are incompetent when they're not being corrupt.
I think the funniest part is when the tech media starts publishing most of their articles on the "weblogs" section of their site. Like InformationWeek's 2 recent lamentable and much trashed articles about GPLv3.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
As much as I hate advertising, this is probably a bad sign. Companies won't do less advertising - it works too well, but at least on CNET we know where (most of?) the ads are. Who is sponsoring this or that tech blog? We've already seen "scandals" like that, although blogs are mostly not journalism. It is probably a lot cheaper and effective to buy out a few blogs and get consistent long term shilling than it is to buy recognizable ads on a bigger site. It has consistently been safe to predict that in the future we will be subject to more and more marketing that is more pervasive and less recognizable than ever before. It never seems to end.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
What do CNET and Business 2.0 offer beyond smart alec FUD columnists and advertiser-friendly reviews?
It was sad to see most of the serious newspapers dry up, leaving nothing but wire fed papers that write to a 4th grade reading level.
It was sad to see local radio stations dry up, leaving nothing but Clear Channel fed recordings from Texas.
However, I have few tears for crappy magazines and their equally vapid online "portals" that never offered much in the first place.
The real issue is that we've sold off the Fourth Estate to advertisers, and we have very little real journalism left. We're all fed our news from the same ~5 mega corps who own everything. We are not informed because we gave up our media to capitalism, which works well as a way to price widgets, but is not really very good at providing truth. It only knows how to provide marketing spin.
Bloggers could provide some respite, but the Internet provides little in terms of a reputation system. Anyone can shout down unpopular truths, and any group can astroturf their marketing messages. Few people who follow Digg or Reddit links verify the credibility of sources they visit.
We've traded our serious tradition of journalism for a cheap bit of daily entertainment from who knows where and a media buffet prepared by a market driven media.
The fact that the least fit portions of our capitalist replacement for journalism are struggling to survive should be expected. The fact that our media is being run like a free market is the real story.
RoughlyDrafted Magazine
The reason these ads are moving to the blogs is because the readership is at the blogs. The reason the readership is there is because bloggers are picking apart opinion pieces throughout the editorial world and reshaping them by arguing against their positions. Thus, readership is fleeing commercial journalism because the commercial rags aren't offering what readers want.
What do readers want? These days, a little fucking truth would help. I think we're all sick of the clear commercial bias inherent in all these supposed tech reviews and bullshit 'secretly sponsored opinion'. The same is happening in professional news. TV and cable news viewership is down. WAY DOWN. Why is that? Because they don't offer news.
When these 'tech journals' hire a few more reporters and start publishing real news, you'll see their readers and advertisers follow right back. Because, frankly, the blog-0-sphere offers no substantial news reporting either.
This highlights that their primary business is not writing and selling tech articles to readers, but selling advertisement space.
A few years ago, Upside magazine went bust. Since I own Downside, I looked into buying their domain, but the assets of Upside were eventually acquired by another tech publishing firm. The article didn't mention Upside, although they mentioned The Industry Standard and Business 2.0, which also tanked.
We also lost Silicon Valley's newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. It's been purchased by an outfit that runs cheesy suburban throwaways, and is being brought down to that level. It's still published, but nobody cares.
And Murdoch is buying the Wall Street Journal. Soon, there will be very few information sources that actually go out and dig out news.
I read through 3/4ths of a website about traditional Japanese swords before I realized it was nothing but a shill for a line of Chinese reproductions sold by the website author. What's funny is that a lot of the information was legitimate. I probably would've bought one of his products if I hadn't felt like I had been conned.
I, for one, welcome our blog-spewing overlords!
No, wait -- that's not what I mean at all. In fact, I mourn the loss of proper technical journalism in the world. Nobody bothers actually reviewing a product, or rendering an original opinion anymore.
Instead, we get twelve pages of ads, with only sixteen paragraphs of whitewash, er, ahem, content spread amongst them.
I miss seeing reviews produced by competent and well-qualified people about things other than the latest 7800GTX repack. Just try to find useful comparison information on printers, monitors, keyboards, or even simple mice. These products are the human interface for the machine and are therefore among the most important facets of it, but unless it's twice as expensive as it should be and is intended for a child's gaming rig then there will be no reviews of it in the blogs.
There's a thousand disparate e-commerce reviews to wade through, sure, but at least they're typically honest. Blog entries (if you can find one related) all lack any semblance of depth or integrity.
The dead-tree derivatives like C|Net and the remains of Ziff-Davis aren't any better these days, as they flail about trying to copy their blog competitor's attention-deficit formatting and lack of editorial oversight, managing only to add more misery to their already inevitable death.
Absolutely nobody ever bothers setting up repeatable tests for comparative measurement of anything in this century unless it can be done in the form of a Quake benchmark. And even then, products offering 1-2% gain for the low-low price of $200 more than everything else in the review are proclaimed to be the "clear winner" by some spineless high-school kid who is afraid to write a bad review for fear that XFX or MSI or whoever will turn off the free hardware spigot in retaliation.
The fact that I find Amazon and Newegg customer reviews by the clueless masses to be some of the most meaningful and useful information available makes me feel like we've lost something important. It's probably gone forever.
I, for one, am not very happy about it.
Kid-proof tablet..
Whenever I run across a cnet page or similar tech news site (slashdot link, google search) I'm always disappointed. Usually everything they have to say could have fit in a paragraph but it's padded with out of context quotes and general fluff. It never tells me the interesting technical details I might want to know (say like kerneltrap summaries or wikipedia articles) nor does it present any well reasoned opinions that I might want to consider. Frankly the content is just so poor it's better to flail around until you run into the blog or other site that actually has something useful to say.
The problem with sites like cnet is that they can't decide who their audience is. If they want to pitch their writing to the general public then they probably should stick with reviewing the iPhone and stay far away from stories about Linus's comments on the GPL3 or the latest groklaw controversy but the mainstream media has that pretty well covered. On the other hand if they want to appeal to people who are more informed about this stuff then dumbing it down and spending the whole time giving context just won't work.
Maybe the problem is they hired journalism majors with a bit of tech knowledge rather than tech guys who can write reasonably. That's the right strategy for the NYT tech section not cnet. I dunno.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Posted by CmdrTaco on Tuesday July 17, @02:00AM
from the advertising-in-tech-media-is-drying-up dept.
CmdrTaco writes with articles from various specialist blogs covering the closing of Slashdot and its affiliates, due to the large decrease in ad revenue that has moved on to real blogs with commentary consisting of real substance and editorial content, instead of Soviet Russia, Netcraft, All your base, you must be new here, natalie portman, and other internet memes. Users will have two weeks to burn all their Karma, and subscribers will be priveledged to know that their remaining subscriptions will pay for the editors' unemployment.
> slashdot, memes, karmaburning, yes, no, wontsomeonethinkofthechildren (tagging beta)
I think the trend of print media succumbing to the "blogosphere" makes some sense for tech media like those discussed in TFA but I don't like where it's heading when it comes to the standard news print media.
I read articles in the New York Times and other major newspapers with a warm and fuzzy notion that the journalist that wrote the piece - even if not totally unbiased - has done some honest, well-funded research and has some authority on the topic at hand. If the news print media were to vanish and be replaced by endless streams of blogs filled with non-objective opinions I think we'd really be sunk.
Maybe a few major newspapers could continue to pull in enough online ad revenue to fund the kinds of journalism they can now, but many small market papers could not. We would then be stuck with an ever-shrinking pool of objective reporters giving us our news, and an exponentially growing pool of acid tongued, uninformed opinion spewers. Not to mention the fact that online crossword puzzles just aren't the same...
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
RSS helps sites by attracting busy people like me who don't have time to surf a dozen sites to find an interesting article. But at the same time it's killing them, because people like me surgically link in to read an article and then close the tab immediately, never so much as considering looking at other features of their site. (It probably doesn't help that I use adblock and overlay all Flash content with control buttons, but that's beside the point.)
I skim approximately three mainstream news sources, a handful of blogs and a few independent news sites for RSS headlines that catch my attention. I spend the rest of my online time reading select forums that are mostly inhabited by people who present what I believe to be intelligent/interesting discourse (yes, believe it or not, that *does* include Slashdot from time to time).
Guess how much time I spend surfing random links and going page to page within a site using their fancy ajax navigation elements? I don't know what the percentage is, but pretty close to zero. 40 page article about Nvidia's latest Geforce gizmo? Skip to conclusion, then go to three of their competitors' sites to see if they concur. There's just too much damn noise and information out there to do it any other way. I use RSS, del.icio.us and a few simple techniques to reduce the web into my own personal CliffsNotes. If I'm representative of any significant segment of the population, then no wonder mainstream news sites are hurting.
The funny thing is that its founder Steve Ciarcia left then market leader Byte Magazine, because it was turning into an advertorial marketing rag. Guess which magazine no longer exists :-)
I don't think that trend is as strong in other parts of the world as it is in the US. Print media are for the most part losing readers and ad clients, but enterprises are rather conservative when it comes to ads online. Talking about Germany, I think we're at least five years behind. Online ad budgets are negligible compared to what is being done in the US. Unfortunately I don't have the latest number, I'm sure we're catching up.
Besides, I'd like to stress the importance of printed media. We still have a couple of good magazines and I'd hate to lose them because supposedly one print magazine can be replaced with a dozen mediocre websites. (PC Professionell, certainly one of the better ones, was recently discontinued while crap like Computerbild is doing fine.) It doesn't really matter whether the end product of good journalism is being published on dead wood or online, but good journalism costs money which you can't make online (yet). At least in some parts of the world.
Yours is a reasonable opinion, but at the same time a little unfair. Take Slashdot, for example. Everybody is always complaining about the lack of editorial quality, yadda yadda yadda. But very few people recognize the fact that Slashdot doesn't break any news.
Slashdot is really a glorified blog. It aggregates news sources from all over, stories that its members think are interesting. But without the original sources that generate these stories -- media outlets who pay writers to produce stories -- outlets like Slashdot disappear.
You claim that readers want "a little fucking truth." Fair enough. But, by definition, Slashdot isn't in a position to generate anything but "a little fucking opinion." And you can't hate on it for doing so. That's what it's here for.
I spent three years as a senior editor at InfoWorld, and I certainly have a lot of criticisms to offer about the tech trade media industry. But I can say, with absolute certainty, that when trade media outlets like InfoWorld disappear you will all be sorry.
It goes against almost every fiber of my cynical being to say this, but your subject heading is full of shit. The problem is one hundred percent structural, zero percent editorial.
There has never been a tech reporter who has picked his baggy-eyed head up off a table and blurted out, "You know what? We need to do more stories about the iPhone." Not one. Editors might think that a 300-story onslaught about the iPhone sounds like a good idea, but only because we have people breathing down our necks, too -- people who are beholden to bullshit metrics like hit counts, which look a whole like hard statistics, but are infinitely less reliable than the reader surveys that they used to conduct on newspaper readers.
The good tech reporters who have stuck with this industry know what they're talking about. They write the stories that blogs like Slashdot link to. They might get it wrong from time to time -- fine. You're all there to call them on it. But they're still providing a valuable service.
What's really wrong with this industry is the same thing that's wrong with every industry -- the willingness to suck cock for money. If you're putting out a blog, and somebody offers you an opportunity to make a lot of money -- money, you gloatingly think, that won't be spent on a mainstream tech media outlet -- shame on you. The only reason that company was able to buy a story is because you sold it to them. Hope you brushed your teeth afterward.
You can pull a statistic out your ass that says the readership is all going to blogs. Fine. But can you really blame the management of the media outlets when they hear something like that? The answer is predictable: More blogs.
Blogs on blogs on blogs. It's great! Blogs don't cost us anything and readers trust blogs more than they do reporters, so screw the reporters' salaries and let's hire more bloggers. The answer is more corporate blogs. And folks like you eat it up.
Yeah, you heard me right. Is the media industry going to shit? Corporate media is on the blame list, for sure. But first on the list is you. Have you ever written your Congressman? Probably not. But even if you have, it's probably futile to ask that you write to your favorite media outlets and ask -- even beg -- them to cover real news, and not just fluff pieces and fake stories.
Media outlets cover bullshit because the metrics tell them that bullshit is what people want, plain and simple.
Hell, the only reason that I still read Slashdot (check out my user ID) is because the demographic of the stories is so narrow that I can guarantee that 5/6 of the stories posted are about something I'm at least slightly interested in. I bet that's not true for half the Slashdot readers, though.
Yes, the world of media is going to shit. Yes, I hate it. Damned if I can do anything about it on my own, though.
Breakfast served all day!
but with more fiber!
/.?
Seriously, though, at what point will ABC/CBS/NBC start running prime time news headlines ripped from
How many reports/blogs have we seen in the past few years are wildly inaccurate, just wrong, or completely blown out of all proportion? Astroturfing, bought studies, fanboyism.
I'm guessing that the blogs are so popular:
1) People go to blogs where they get to read stuff that agrees with their own ideas/attitudes
2) People don't want to spend time to read anything substantive (ie, RTFA)
3) Ok, this one is good- narrow focus on a subject that you want to learn about
4) We shall totally refrain from the topic of political blogs.
5) Main stream media can be/will be/usually are behind in reporting things that have been mentioned on blogs. Supposedly, main stream media does fact checking, plus camera shots, background, live shots, etc. With a blog, you can pretty much just type anything you want with no reprecussions (with the usual caveats)
I know that mainstream media is abhorrent now, but at least (again, supposedly) they do some background into seek before splashing the "bad news" over anyones' walls.
Cheers
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Only tech news is so fragile that it can be conveyed by blogs. For other subjects (international analysis, arts, music, politic), most subjects treated are not really news. It might be for some readers but it's not the point. The editorial policies are what makes the content worth reading. Automatic RSS aggregators poorly replaces editors.
Personally, I find that even if I can customize to a point the content I get from the net, I got the huge problem of being spectator of what already interests me. I still have the curiosity to look out for new things that could interest me. My bookmarks or my subscribed feeds do a poor job for bringing me new sites (have you noticed how many blogs never change their subject and then die out of exhaustion ?).
Until there is a GoogleBot ready for handling the way I discover relevant intellectual information, I will need some human piece of advice. That's why journalists always were for I think. That's why they would stay. That started without an audience, I don't think audience is that relevant for journalism.
I read some comment saying that "paper press is dead". It's not. At least I seriously hope so. The ad-driven papers are suffering, I hope they will suffer more and more. Ad-free media has a price, pay for it if you can! Don't you think that ad-driven news will abuse you again, and again, and again, and again ... until the last drop of ink on earth will have been spent on attempting to make you buy something you didn't even think about before; on feeding you altered news; on conveying lies in the sole purpose of the interest of something or someone or some people that is not you, nor your family, nor your friends or anyone else for that matter ?
In the UK PC magazines have been closing in recent years at a fiendish rate although blogs or forums have just sped up something that was already happening.
Magazines go through cycles. When something new comes out or is changing in popularity, magazines flourish as people try to learn as much as possible about a subject. Then once things get to a point where said item is either so easy to use, you don't need help or becomes so mainstream people just accept the state of the art as is and don't bother investigating further.
The result is sales fall, ad revenue falls and the market consolidates and we're seeing that now in the IT press.
Previous victims include HiFi magazines - huge in the 70's and 80's when you could read all about fine tuning turntables, building concrete speaker stands and all that good stuff. Then CD and reasonably OK stuff for cheap came out and suddenly only real HiFi nuts cared - for most people an all-in-one set up was good enough. In the UK HiFi magazines went from a dozen and a half titles to 2 or 3 thin efforts.
Further back, we were awash with Microwave magazines, freezer magazines and so on. Once people became confortable with the products, they stopped buying them.
Most editors I've worked with since about 2000 reckoned IT mags in print were dead or about to be and it's surpring they've lasted as long as they have. You want reviews? Why wait a month - get it online the day it comes out. Help? Tutorials? it's all here for free on the web. The only real difference is the quality. Some websites go in to far more detail on a product than a magazine would ever bother but equally, general editorial tends to be better in a magazine where an editor has tidied up bad prose or woolly thinking.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I'm sorry, but it usually takes readers to sell advertisements. To get the readers, you have to have compelling content. None of these magazines have compelling content.
When is the last time you picked up ANYTHING from Ziff Davis and wanted to read it? Most of these magazines are filled with either articles that don't tell the whole story, gussied up press releases, six month old tips for the novice, editorials that are just written by FUD spewing morons selling their page to the highest bidder (I'm looking right at you, Mr. Dvorak), or news I read about three weeks ago on Slashdot (four weeks ago from other sources).
Why the hell do I want to cut down some trees and PAY for that?
I actually used to have a job for a PR firm that worked exclusively for tech companies. One of my duties was to scan these rags for articles about clients, or about their field of business. In that year, I skimmed pretty much every tech publication that was worth mentioning: PC Week, PC Magazine, Computerworld, Byte, Wired, Red Herring, Dr. Dobb's Journal, PC World, CRM, etc. Not a single one can keep up in print, with the pace of the tech sector today. They barely could 10 years ago when the web was new. Now, they are relegated to informing people that only have a passing interest in technology, because all the people that are actively engaged already know.
I can't imagine why the advertisers are leaving.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Did you read anything the the Byte editors wrote about the end of the magazine? Tom Halfhill's Tom's Unofficial BYTE FAQ: The Death of BYTE Magazine ? The advertising was drying up well before CMP purchased McGraw-Hill technology publications (including Byte.) By that time, enough magazines with a strong focused interest existed that it was tough for a generalist like Byte to sell advertising. If Microsoft wanted to advertise NT4, they could reach more of their potential customers by advertising in Information Week, rather than Byte. If NuMega wanted to sell a memory leak tester to developers, they could reach more of their audience in Dr. Dobbs Journal. Texas Instruments DSP group could reach more hardware designers by advertising in Microprocessor Report.
Byte was a great magazine for someone like me who was interested in how popular technology was currently used today, what advantages and disadvantages alternate technologies had, and what was coming up in the future. Articles from chip design to heterogeneous user management. I wasn't a good target for many of the advertisers though. (I wasn't interested in the Microsoft NT ads, because I wasn't trying to set up an windows network. I wasn't interested in the NuMega ads, because I wasn't developing for Intel hardware. I wasn't interested in the TI DSP articles, because I wasn't doing hardware design, etc.) and those advertiser didn't want to pay for me to see their ads. The end result is a high subscriber base for a tech magazine with lower per subscriber ad revenue. Not a good business model.