Headscratching in the Blogosphere

This may be the best blog conversation I've ever read.

David Carr has a piece in the New York Times today entitled A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs.  The piece is largely about Nick Denton, an entrepeneur who has made some serious money off controlled blogging.He runs Gizmodo and Fleshbot and other high traffic sites that don't require a lot of interactivity.

A few weeks back, I wrote a piece about another NYT that was factually innaccurate at best and deliberately misleading at worst.  Today I read through this piece by David Carr and was confused through it.  What is Denton Bearish About?  The article says he's killing off some low traffic sites.  Okay.  That's what one would expect.  But the article just didn't make sense.  Lucky for me, I no longer subscribe to the New York Times in a vacuum.  What did the other blogs tell me?

Heather Green in turn shares my confusion about what the article is saying.  Is Denton bearish on getting funding or on blogs in general or certain types of blogs?

Either we have a headline writer problem here or a writer problem. Don't get me wrong, I thought it was interesting about Denton's strategies for refreshing his blogs. But without any clarification, I suppose I will vote for thinking that Denton is down on funding blogs, since Carr writes a business column.

Rex Hammock tells me from the first line, the article is based on an inaccurate premise.

The times says:

THE blogging bubble has been taking on serious air of late. Last week, PaidContent.org, a blog that covers digital media, held its first mixer. It was, by all reports, filled to the brim with money and content guys speed dating on the way to marriage.

Hammock replies:

I was at the mixer and the vast majority of attendees were wearing nametags that suggested they work for the digital divisions of traditional media companies. These were NOT blogger types. They were mobile phone types. They were HBO and MTV and New York Times types. They were Reuters and AP and McGraw-Hill and Time, Inc. types. Indeed, I must have seen a couple dozen name tags with New York Times on them, including the publisher (although I don't think he was wearing a name tag). My point: there may have been some bubbling at the Paidcontent.org mixer, but it had little to do with blogging.

And Publishing 2.0 handily deconstructs Denton's empire.

If you look at the growth in Gawker’s most successful sites, you’ll see that what sells in new media is what has always sold in media:

1. Porn - Fleshbot (NOT work safe)
2. Gossip - Gawker, Defamer
3. Sports - Deadspin
4. Games - Kotaku

Gizdmodo represents a relatively new category that was underserved in mainstream media — gadgets for geeks.

The two sites that Gawker is selling, Sploid and Screenhead, were also attempts to go after established media niches — supermarket tabloids and Boing Boing.

With all the talk of revolution, it’s amazing how little new there is in the media galaxy.

A friend of mine who used to be a bureau chief for UPI and Reuters during his career once told me that the only journalists that were worth a damn were accidental ones.  That's, perhaps, because he described himself as an accidental journalist.  Later in that same conversation he answered my most burning journalism question "Why do journalists think that a sentence is a paragraph?"  He answered that by saying, "Journalists don't really write."

It seemed like a smug answer at the time and I let it drop.  Since then he's left the field and moved into a different one.  Totally outside journalism.  My friend has been very successful, though, because he understands how the media works and how to craft a good story for them to print.  His new venture(s) have been wildly successful because of this.

It makes me wonder if this times piece was more Denton's ability to spin a good tale for a Times reporter and less actual substance.  It makes me glad that blogs are around to deconstruct these articles and extend the conversation.

Photo: Tony Roberts

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, journalism, mainstream media, new york times, nick denton, david carr