I read an intriguing article in The Atlantic over the weekend, discussing the probable implosion to The New York Times and what its future may be. One paragraph, in particular, struck me:
At some point soon--sooner than most of us think--the print edition, and with it, the Times as we know it, will no longer exist...What would a post-print Times look like?
Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. This would allow the Times to continue to impose its live-from-the-Upper-West-Side brand on the world without having to literally cover every inch of it.
In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters--now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases--could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting in with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world, unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.
This is a similar prognostication to what I offered up recently, one that I find increasingly compelling.
Ironically, my very presence here on CNET may confirm it. CNET's Blog Network is filled with non-CNET employees, like me. We offer CNET breadth, allowing CNET's staff reporters to offer depth in particular areas of interest (e.g., Stephen Shankland focuses on Google and Yahoo, as well as search, online advertising, portals, and digital photography). That depth will then be picked up by other publications to feed its breadth, while they choose to go deep in other areas.
Symbiotic, interesting, and effective. So long as the depth is strong, people will pay for access to that content, be it through subscriptions (I am and hope to always be a paid subscriber to The Wall Street Journal, as there's little more comforting than reading it on my couch at the end of a day), advertisements, or some other means.
Such a strategy enables the media to be many things to many people without having to undergo the burden of failing to be all things to all people. I think it's a winner.
I stumbled across this March 2008 post from The Guardian on the top-50 blogs on the Web. (Spoiler: The Open Road isn't one of them. :-) I'm proud to say that I only read one of them: TechCrunch.
Why proud? Well, because my primary interest is in digging up what's not already "popular." Unfortunately, I'm as guilty as anyone of recycling "news," but real traffic comes from breaking new ground, and I find that by scouring Digg and much lesser-known blogs.
Granted, most of the 50 are popular because they're either political or simply in-your-face opinionated on popular culture. I like government - most of my pre-tech background was in politics and political science - but I find that I have little patience for petty politics anymore. As for in-your-face, well, I get enough of that from myself to need to abuse from someone else.
On that note, it's interesting how few of the top-50 blogs are devoted to technology. We do a lot of navel-gazing in the technology world, but apparently few others care to gaze at our navels. Does this suggest that the future of technology news should be more accessible to non-techies, the way that TechCrunch often is?
Regardless, no Drudge Report for me. Instead I'll be reading OpenDotDotDot and other "lesser" blogs. Hopefully this will keep translating into rising Open Road readership in 2009. Maybe we'll break the top-5,000,000 by 2012. One can dream....
Browsing through Dan Farber's review of a recent Pew Research Center survey on news readership, I was reminded of one of the central tenets of blogging: blogging helps to destroy the business models powering its original source material:
While the Internet is growing as the place where people go for news, the revenue simply isn't catching up fast enough. The less obvious part of the Internet overtaking newspapers as the main source for national and international news is that much of the seed content--the original reporting that breaks national and international news and is subsequently refactored by legions of bloggers--comes from the reporters and editors working at the financially strapped newspapers and national and local television outlets.
I've long recognized this, and have taken my share of swipes at a new web mentality that celebrates aggregating largely amateur content, without providing the financial incentives to replace such content with professional content. But what to do about it?
Looking at my own readership patterns, I tend to read the front and back of magazines and newspapers. That is, I read the headlines (much of which derive from original research and authorship on the part of that publication) and the op-ed page. Everything else tends to be minor filler, "Associated Press" content that doesn't motivate me to purchase.
Is the new model for media to discard the AP and focus on original content?
I don't mean the model that The New York Times has taken, focusing on a publication that is almost entirely of its own making, nor the experiments that The Wall Street Journal is making.
Rather, I mean making media heavier in two core areas: the big stories that no one else can do better than a given publication, and the commentary on the big stories and everything else, because the commentary on the little stories arguably makes them much more interesting.
And so, TechCrunch thrives because its founder, Michael Arrington, is an industry player that has conversations with technology's movers and shakers that others get less often, if at all. I'd wager that people read The New York Times as much for its columnists as for its slant on the news. Ditto for The Wall Street Journal. I read Businessweek starting at the back, plowing through commentary and then usually giving up once I get to the "news."
Less filler, more killer: is this the new model?
If I'm not alone in how and what I read, then the answer to media's woes is to stop pretending to be all things to all people, and instead to significantly up investment in a limited but potent brew of original news reporting, focused in areas in which one's staff has competitive differentiation, as well as the best commentary for this and everything else.
In one of the clearest testaments to date that Microsoft is increasingly open to open source, a group within Microsoft has released Oxite, a "standards-compliant and highly extensible content management platform," designed as a developer-grade blogging platform, as reported in PC World.
The project sounds interesting, but I'm particularly intrigued by its origin, which came about in true open-source fashion:
They built it not because there is a need for another blog engine, but because they were building the MIX Online site for Web designers and wanted to offer an example of a use for ASP.NET MVC, according to the Oxite Web site.
That's exactly how it's supposed to happen. The fact that software is now born in Redmond in this open-source manner, however, is something to cheer.
I never liked the Fake Steve Jobs blog because I didn't like an author to be able to hide behind anonymity. When Dan Lyons, the then-Forbes and now Newsweek reporter, revealed his identity as Fake Steve Jobs and decided to continue blogging as Real Dan Lyons, I cheered. I know Dan and respect the reporting he's done over the years, even when it hasn't been favorable to open source.
Why? Because I can always count on Dan to tell the truth, as he sees it. Dan pulls no punches.
This past week, that tendency toward brutal candor caught up with him, as The Guardian reports. Dan lashed out at Yahoo! for lying to reporters like him and at The Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher for conceit, only to have both blog posts removed. (I caught the Yahoo! post in my RSS reader before it disappeared. You can find it here.)
The Guardian seems to think such censorship is a necessary evil:
...[I]t must be tough for Dan Lyons. He could say more or less what he liked as Fake Steve because it was satirical (many a true word spoken in jest, as they say), and that brought him a big audience. He can't say the same sort of things as Real Dan and a Newsweek employee, so he doesn't have a big audience. And there certainly isn't enough money in blogging for him to give up the day job.
Are we happy about this? That Dan may have "bailed on blogging" due to pressure from Newsweek? I know I'm not.
Dan stepped over the line, perhaps, but I still prefer it to the watered-down non-news that most media publications shovel out. And, closer to home, Newsweek is talking out of both sides of its mouth in censoring Dan's blog. On one side, it apparently forced Dan to remove the posts. On the other, it headlines his blog in this way:
(Credit:
Newsweek)
So, which Dan Lyons does Newsweek actually want? The answer is most likely "both," but it seems to believe it can have both without the occasional bout of squeamishness. It's not going to happen.
The people who read Dan's work in Newsweek are generally not going to be the same people that read his Real Dan Lyons blog: grit in the latter does not affect his credibility in the former for 99 percent of the population.
That "grit" is sorely lacking in most reporting, which pretends to take a safe, neutral, and distant view on everything from Yahoo!'s change in executive leadership to child-rearing tips, perhaps afraid of the hovering specter of a lawsuit. Well, I for one am glad that Dan takes risks, even when I don't agree with him, and even when I think he steps over the line. Bring back the blog, Dan. We need the raw commentary.
If it's true, as ReadWriteWeb reports, that factual and grammatical errors are hurting bloggers' credibility as news sources, this should be a boon for traditional news media, right?
As in open source, the more noise (think: thousands of packages in the Linux kernel), the more money will be paid to those that can cut through the noise (think: Red Hat Enterprise Linux or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server). Could it be that the best thing that ever happened to mainstream news media is the cacophony of the blogosphere?
In other words, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and friends, you owe me big time for spehling pourly and not cheking fax.
Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg recently delivered a "state of the nation" address at WordCamp, Wordpress' user and developer conference. It turns out that open source can be very good for business. Very, very good.
Consider this growth at Wordpress:
- Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month
- 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats
- 120-160 million global unique visitors per month
- Two million new blogs created for the year
- 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million)
I'm always amused by comments on this blog suggesting that I'm biased against Microsoft. Of course I am. I'm a blogger, not a journalist. Who told you otherwise?
I compete with Microsoft and am a strong believer in open source. I'm biased. That said, I'm also an admirer of much of Microsoft's technology. It is not easy to make software that works well (or reasonably well) for such a widely disparate global population of users. Microsoft tends to make complex technology look easy.
So, I have professional respect for Microsoft, both technology and business practices. I also have professional disdain for Microsoft, both technology and business practices. It's hard to be overwhelmingly for or against Microsoft.
Yes, you'll read a fair number of posts on this blog that are critical of Microsoft. Get used to it. You see, it's an open source blog, and until Steve Ballmer figures out how to say "open source" without throwing up in his mouth, there will likely be an "anti-Microsoft" angle to many of the themes I cover. If you want the rosy view on Microsoft, head over to the MSDN blogs and lose yourself in praise of Microsoft.
But if you stop off here, expect to hear criticism of Microsoft. If you don't like it, there are lots of other blogs on the planet to read. Just don't waste my time with comments that complain that I don't love Microsoft more. Microsoft has billions in the bank. It doesn't need my love.
I just realized that a little over a year and 2,064 posts ago, this blog was born. I've had a lot of fun with the blog. While I'm not always right (a nice way of saying "often wrong"), I appreciate the patience and insight that many readers share in the comments section, and in other blogs that reference The Open Road.
Because of such references, the traffic for this blog has increased significantly. How significantly? Put it this way: Traffic has gone up 1000 percent since July 2007. We've had millions of visitors and page views in The Open Road's inaugural year.
Traffic on the Open Road blog
Over the year, it has also become increasingly clear from which sources most people learn about posts here. While an increasing number are repeat offenders who subscribe to the blog (including a significant number of people who hate the blog but can't seem to leave :-), 76 percent are net new visitors. The big traffic generators? In order of traffic:
... Read moreI mostly have stopped reading comments to this blog because what passes for "discussion" in the comments section tends to be inane, rude, and/or vapid, and often all three at the same time. "On the Internet, no one knows that you're a dog," goes the saying. Or that you're a jerk.
Now, most people are not jerks. They just become losers when cloaked in anonymity. They say things they'd never say if confronted with the people they flame on discussion boards, in comments sections, etc. They're probably nice people "in real life." It's just on the web that they let it all hang out, to the detriment of the web and intelligent discussion.
Take the comments to one of my recent posts. The first is led off by "h3h" who apparently has no sense of humor (completely missing my point in the post), but can't leave it at that, then going on to lob ad hominems into his "argument."
"H3h" turns out to be Brad Fults. Judging from his web presence, like his Twitter feed, he's probably an OK guy. He happens to be wrong in the way he chose to comment on this blog, but he's probably a well-intentioned person, normally. [UPDATE: Brad commented below, and I also talked with a friend of his. Turns out he's a really good person. I caught him on a bad day, apparently.]
... Read more
