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."
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.
I've had it enough with mainstream media who are incompetent when they're not being corrupt.
It's not a matter of editors eating up all their money as it is that that they have a reputation for spanning their articles over 3 or 4 times as many pages as they should in a blatant attempt to get more 'clickthroughs' or 'eyeballs' or whatever they call it. If they used ads responsibly and had legitimate content, maybe people would think twice about either turning off their ad-blocking software or clicking on an ad or two. I know I would.
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QuantumG seems like a guy who is bitter he isn't in the same position.
Multiple pages are annoying, yes, but the biggest problem is the lack of links. When talking about technology, there's usually a relevant web site. Blogs will link to it, maybe adding some commentary of their own. But most journalism is written with the intent that you'll learn everything you want to know from the article itself, or other articles from the same source. Unfortunately I'm not sitting on a bench in the park in 1960 reading a newspaper, I'm on the internet, and if your site won't link to more information about the subject at hand, I'll go somewhere that will. And I don't just mean links to related stories - I want links to other sites. I know it's scary, but don't worry, if your story is interesting, I'll open it in another tab, and I'll continue ignoring your ads when I close it.
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.
That might be part of it, but I think the main reason tech journalism is failing is because so much of tech journalism is really third rate regurgitation of company press releases. Journalism on the whole has been failing the public, but I think tech journalism has been on the leading edge of that failure.
More broadly, mass media on the whole sucks. And now that it's possible for anyone to produce media, the suck monopoly is broken. There are a lot of sucky tech blogs out there, just like there's lots of bad video on you tube and crappy bands competing for attention on MySpace. Why buy mass media crap or read mass media crap when there is all this other crap? The mainstream can't compete with this inundation of crap, at least not without offering a quality product. And what are the chances of that?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.
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