Lost In The Post?
By Neil Dodds
21 February, 2006
More pouring of cold water on the blog bonfire. This time, it's in the Financial Times' weekend edition, and Trevor Butterworth is the master of ceremonies.
Butterworth's case - is blogging an information revolution, about to stomp mainstream media into the ground, or (as he suspects) is it just another rehash of the dot.com bubble of 1999 - is backed with some interesting numbers. Some of the biggest-name bloggers are said to be making around $20,000 a month from advertising on their sites. Others, with very respectable hit counts, are thought to bring in around $1000 a year. Butterworth reckons that a well-frequented political site could rake in around $1000-$2000 a month: Not bad, but hardly a living, and stilll a figure beyond the reach of most bloggers.
Blog audiences have stratified relatively quickly, too. At the top of the shelf, you have two extremely popular sites bringing in a million readers a day. The top ten blogs all receive more than 120,000 visits daily. But after that, there's a steep plunge to the depths, with even the world's 100th most popular blog getting fewer than 10,000 readers a day.
I don't think that's particularly awful, however. If the hundredth most popular blog is a straight take on world politics, it is unlikely to set the world on fire. However, 10,000 readers a day compares well with ultra-local newspapers, and if our blogger number 100 can demonstrate his readers are local, or have a special interest of some sort, he could probably do reasonable business via advertising.
Nevertheless, Butterworth is probably right to take issue with Michael S. Malone's claim that,
"Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news and has created a whole new group of major media companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies.”
Butterworth is even tougher on bloggers' dependence on professional journalists for material.
"Its dependency... brings to mind Swift’s fleas sucking upon other fleas “ad infinitum”: somewhere there has to be a host for feeding to begin.
"That blogs will one day rule the media world is a triumph of optimism over parasitism."
Bloggers in Iran and China get to speak about issues that the authorities prevent from being aired in the media. Thanks to the efforts of the alternative press in the 1960s, he argues, US citizens already have this freedom.
He quotes former Wonkette blogger Ana Marie Cox (Butterworth gets some great quotes from the jaded former revolutionaries of the Blog World):
"...There’s always going to be a New York Times. As a culture, we like to have a narrative that we kind of agree on. You and your cohorts may believe that it’s liberal elitist propaganda - or you may think it’s corporate, conservative hegemony. But there’s a sense in which it’s good to have The New York Times because we need to know that this is the dominant storyline right now. Cable news has the same function. I guess the idea is that in Jakarta somebody at their computer is going to type up a news story about what’s going on in Jakarta. But you know, I think I do want a professional reporter doing that as well.”
Another former blogger, Choire Sicha, goes further still:
"Where is the reporting? Where is the reliability? The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds."
Sicha and Cox are perfect illustrations of the author's next point: That to make serious money from blogging, you have to make your name there and move on somewhere else. Some bloggers have received big advances from publishers, having demonstrated their sass and writing skills online for some years. Others switch to mainstream careers once traditional outlets pick up on their work.
It must be exciting stuff for professional hacks and publishers who have, for the past few years, watched helplessly as new media evangelists have talked away their careers. Many bloggers, of course, will argue that the FT is mainstream media, and of course it will snobbishly defend its patch against the blog world's noisy assault.
But Butterworth isn't just here to bury blogs. The media world is changing, whether through blogs or other competing technologies, but newspapers can respond. He notes, correctly, that the "dinosaur" traditional media has shown its ability to evolve when confronted with rival news sources - look at the web, convergence, even the introduction of blogs to newspapers.
Newspapers and broadcasters will still be running when many of today's bloggers have retired back to the barstool (what I suspect Butterworth sees as the natural habitat of the blog world's politics department).
This doesn't address the the biggest issue facing the media today, however:
"Isn’t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers?"
Butterworth gamely created a blog to discuss his controversial piece. Check it out - and don't miss the comments section, where Butterworth discusses his article with critics and supporters.
|
 Printer friendly version
 Email this article to a friend
Related articles:
|
