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September 24, 2007
A Semi-Anonymous Voice, Craving Notice
The funniest things about Peter Bart’s latest missive about bloggers are that, 1) He thinks he has “blogger friends” that somehow represent a deep truth about the internet, and 2) he is such a fan of throwing stones in his glass house.
He writes, “The new lexicon of blogdom is all about traffic, not about ideas. Bloggers are into "tagging." They are obsessed with "link bait." A hot item is useless unless it can be linked and Drudgified. Any hack can blog items about all the young celebrities who are self-destructing. The first sentence, however, had better start with Lindsay Lohan climbing out of her limo without underwear.
The bloggers I know are so hungry for attention that they suffer from attention deficit syndrome. Their blogs have become a narcotic: The highs are downright beatific. Then the numbers come in and they trigger the low.”
Apparently, Peter Bart doesn’t know anyone who has made a financial and critical success of their blog. (And don’t even get me started about "the low" of traditional journalists who realize their “exclusive” isn’t really exclusive after all. Of course, this never stops hacks in either medium from claiming the exclusive anyway… because if you say it enough, some will believe it… which also helps define Mr. Bart’s column this week.)
But the truth is that most of Bart’s “blogger friends” are likely people who work for him and are concerned about keeping their jobs and know that proving their worth will be connected to their numbers and the perception of their value, which is directly related to other forums where their bosses can see they are being valued in the community. As an aggregator, we have long been on the more pleasant side of this, able to drive both traffic and perception of value for “bloggers,” even more so in Traditional Media than with small blogs, who are, amusingly, far less obsessed with “success.”
A Drudge link is a much bigger boost than an MCN link, obviously. A Drudge link pretty much guarantees tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of clicks. One popular industry gossip blog, based on the numbers they claim, must get at least 50% of their clicks from Drudge. Of course, Drudge linkage is not purely earned. Not only do Drudge & Breitbart have grudges – many a decade old – but they make other choices, like supporting Box Office Mojo, a site whose operators are said to share the rightwing political beliefs of Drudge and his financial supporters.
Of course, this is no different than media has been forever. A story in the Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or USA Today can be worth its weight in gold to a wannabe IPO or business in need of a boost. And while the coin of the web seems to be click-thrus, the real key, as in all areas of business, is perception. What is the secret to being seen as “successful” on the web? Get an editor at a major to think you are The Shit. A few stories about your business and zoom… you are Gawker… terribly “important,” but not actually financially successful enough to sell itself for tens of millions of dollars. Or, for that matter, you are Salon, still scraping to survive after all these years of quality work and perceived importance.
Yes, working a website is like having a newborn for the first time, the experience of working exclusively on the internet is something you learn as you go. There is no manual. For those of us who were there from the early days, there was no precedent.
Like most people having their second child, once they have learned from their early years, they gain perspective and are less compulsive about the experience the next time out. True, there are people who will never be anything but nervous parents. But if you able to find balance, the experience changes quite a bit and very different concerns emerge.
“Blogs,” as we know them now, are less than a five year old phenomenon. We are still years from any real maturity to the form. (We will know we are reaching real maturity when the entire culture is no longer defined effectively by one word, “blog.”). Maturity which will lead, I imagine, to a lot less blogging from Traditional Media such at Variety.
You see, those of us who have been around this block, even with significantly fewer financial resources, have come to understand the nature of the beast (at least, as it lives now). So we know that, for instance, having 8 blogs without significant audiences on Variety.com is simply a bad idea. We have seen iFilm try to build a business in this style with bulletin board technology… and fail. We have seen Gawker build five major blogs, a raft of barely living ones, and a parade of ones that have been dumped. And here at MCN, we have experienced some very talented people who simply have not committed to the format, which makes maintaining an audience impossible. Even those who have committed have had a hard time building an audience without turning into the kinds of gossips that get so much attention for a few months at a time. (As soon as I start identifying myself as an insect, I will know it is time to find a new life.)
It is, further, a sign of immaturity in this game to be obsessing on your traffic. First, if you need to obsess on it, you don’t have enough traffic to obsess about. And second, if you are obsessing on the various ranking services that are out there for free, you are obsessing on bad information. All of these services are based on samples that are dependent on self-selection. They do not and cannot track your actual traffic. If you care, I suggest you get a service to track your own traffic and read that. It’s expensive, but if you want to sell ads, you have no choice. (Please also note, people who talk about how much traffic they have all the time probably have less traffic, in perspective to other sites, than they are leading you to believe.) But again, the novelty in figuring out who is linking to you from Peoria and Budapest and Venezuela wears off in time. I used to get a few IMs a week about some weird site that was sending thousands of people to our pages. Now… almost never, though we are linked by other sites more than ever.
Excitement Exhaustion is the same phenomenon we have found with personal web logs. Unless someone is showing off their body, maintaining interest in their lunch, buying, and bathroom habits is not easy. Of course, these “blogs” are what people like Peter Bart would have you believe define the “blogosphere.”
But there is a bigger problem with Bart & blogs. If you read Variety’s blogs, they are mostly about Variety. If a story breaks, you can be sure that you’ll have a chance to read Variety’s take on it. And… if you are on a Variety page… who cares? It’s not that Variety does not do a good job in its niche… and that is the ultimate irony… that Variety is, unlike, say, The New York Times, not a full-service journalistic outlet, but every bit the niche play that, say, Movie City, TV City, and Theater City News would be… but it is not an outlet where one seeks either deep or dark truths about the industry. It is, first and last, a trade magazine… not that there’s anything wrong with that. And with that limitation, the only way to make the web work for that product is to get on the web horse and drive, drive, drive that traffic in a focused, coordinated way. Variety.com is not a place to hang out and is unlikely to ever be that. And giving someone a blog on Variety.com doesn’t make that person a personality the way being given a slot on the NYT Op-Ed pages does.
Bart closes, “Here are all these folks sitting at home on their computers, and what's the biggest thing on their mind? Traffic.”
And what’s the biggest thing on the minds of Variety staff… and LA Times staff… and ABC staff… etc, etc, etc.? Selling ads so they can all keep their jobs, sit in the office on their computers, get health insurance, and go to a lot of parties, dinners, etc. paid for by the company.
Finally, a word about “folks sitting at home on their computers.” I have worked full-time, paid real salaries, for Entertainment Weekly and TNT’s roughcut.com, both of which had lovely offices. I worked at home for each. In the case of roughcut, when I took over the editorship, I moved the offices to Los Angeles. We paid a lot of rent for a lovely suite of offices in Larchmont Village. And my office… it was most often empty… because in a modern world, the only people in media who need offices to go to are people who, a) cannot get their company to pay for the office expenses at home, b) have to be managed closely, or c) love staff meetings.
Yes, there is an advantage to community in a business and part of me wishes I could assemble the entire MCN team once a week. They would feel more connected to me and Managing Editor Laura Rooney and one another. But the whole, “they are working from their bedroom” schtick is more avoidance of reality as well. Harry Knowles, for better or for worse, knows more about what is going on in his film niche than any one reporter at Variety or probably anywhere else… from his big chair or his bed and his wheelchair, which have been located in Austin, Tx for most of the last decade he has been on the web. If you want to have a serious discussion, we can talk about how he uses that information or how conflicted he is. But the only thing other than a telephone and a computer connecting most people in “Hollywood” is lunch a couple of times a year, at best. If you want to have a serious conversation, get serious, Mr. Bart.
All that said, Variety is allowing one of its writer/bloggers to participate in MCN's Gurus o' Gold for the first time this season. So maybe Bart gets it more than he lets on - maybe he realizes that for the same reason he gives prime space on Variety's online film page to Retrack, Movies.com, and Moviefone - and realizes that all of these mediums, mature and immature, are all driven by getting the word out and that it is a fight. That would make sense coming from the man who kicked his main rival, The Hollywood Reporter, in the groin by stealing their main blogger, Anne Thompson, and their editor, Cynthia Littleton... who is now blogging for Variety.
(Note: This 1700-plus word blog entry was written after some serious consideration of Mr Bart's column and the industry as a whole. How considered and deeply thought out do we think Mr Bart's 555 word column - which is loaded with automated links to old Variety stories about keywords their computers pick up - was?)
Posted by poland at September 24, 2007 02:30 PM
Comments
Miami Heat: HE'S THOUGHT OUT. (paid for by the committee to assist David Poland in his assertion that Peter Bart does not have any "blogging friends". Also... Bart... what the hell were you doing getting in the trunk of a taxi on SHOOTOUT? That lacked decorum, sir. That lacked... decorum.)
Posted by: IOIOIOI ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 24, 2007 04:35 PM
he comes across as a man still using a typewriter, someone longing for the days of radio because this thing called television just...cannnot...last...
Posted by: hendhogan at September 24, 2007 04:51 PM
The analogy has become something of a cliche these days, but Bart is just an analog guy in a digital world. I just went on an insulin pump that runs much the same way that a PDA does and my doctor was startled that I figured it out so quickly, because most of the older folks with diabetes just weren't familiar enough with electronics and had problems just turning it on.
Bart didn't grow up with the internet like I did and hasn't seen it grow organically the way it has because he wasn't "plugged in" from the start. He views blogs as a fad that will eventually die out, when the truth is much like what David said; that blogs are only in their infancy and will continue to progress.
Posted by: Noah at September 24, 2007 08:51 PM
I thought it was very funny and a little sad that now Variety is full throttle on the blog thing yet they're head honcho is showing his complete and utter lack of understanding of the whole thing.
Posted by: bipedalist at September 24, 2007 08:55 PM
"And what’s the biggest thing on the minds of Variety staff… and LA Times staff… and ABC staff… etc, etc, etc.? Selling ads so they can all keep their jobs, sit in the office on their computers, get health insurance, and go to a lot of parties, dinners, etc. paid for by the company."
Yeah, well said. Maybe Bart does do it but you can bet there are lowly worms in the basement sweating the numbers. They're trying to catch up but they don't yet seem to realize that there is room for all "in here." Variety does what it does, MCN does what it does -- Variety doesn't need to blog up, especially if all of its blogs are going to do is offer news. It already has the news thing down cold. It is going to have to grow some big, hairy balls to do the blog thing good and proper.
Posted by: bipedalist at September 24, 2007 09:01 PM
The best blogs don't have the big corporate magazine to run off. The ones where the commenters engage in a conversation, you know, a community.
Check out Eschaton. Minimalist posts, most of the action is in the comments.
Daily Kos is a HUGE community that gets about a half million hits a day.
Posted by: doug r at September 24, 2007 10:18 PM
The thing about blogs is that the fact that anyone and everyone can have them without any sort of talent or skill for writing or web design does make them lesser considerations on the internet IMO. There is a really big difference in the way they're run compared to many websites, where whoever has posting ability can just post whatever/whenever they want and it's a classic case of "whoever posts the fastest and most, posts best" and it allows for a lot of really poor quality material to slip in with the decent, insightful opinion pieces... and it leaves the readers having to check them every day in case there's that one thing worth reading. I don't think allowing readers to immediately comment publically is that worthwhile as a reasoning for doing content as a blog either and my own decision to move my column to a blog (even though it's written and edited exactly the same way) has not been met with a very positive response and noticeably decreased readership.
I think a lot of people feel the way Bart and the studios do ...that if you merely write a blog or that you're a "blogger", you're not on the same level as those who actually bother to design, build and run regular websites.
Posted by: EDouglas at September 25, 2007 04:48 AM
I don't think that's particularly right either, Ed. Coming Soon is not Variety, which has a long history of dominating entertainment news here in Los Angeles. Both HR and Variety have to compete now with the New York Times and yes, even blogs like this one. People go to different sites for different reasons - no one needs to spend all of their time on one site anymore, hence the one-stop-shopping idea was always top-heavy. Daily Kos is basically one topic torn apart a hundred ways. They don't also need to have a movies section and a Dear Abby section, etc. Variety is always ground zero for me for news. I don't go to them for their communities or their blogs (ditto NY Times, although that's changing for me lately).
Posted by: bipedalist at September 25, 2007 05:31 AM
First, to use "bloggers" as a blanket term is such a generalization as to immediately dilute his point. You wouldn't use "columnist" that way - are you talking about the 10-year old writing for his school newsletter or the hobbyist writing for his local crafts guild or the S&M expert writing for a raunchy rag or a Rhodes scholar writing for an academic journal? It works both ways. True, the internet gives you immediate equal access - but just as in print media, where you choose to spend your time is a reflection of you, not the media, and not the bloggers/columnists.
We're shifting to computer-based work, where your work is omnipresent - at an office, at home, an airport, a hotel, a coffee shop. Where don't we work? And the internet is 24/7. When don't we work? To judge the quality of work because a person isn't chained to a desk is so antiquated it's a non sequitur. Talking about bloggers missing a story because of a 4-yr old throwing up is as patronizing and unprofessional as considering Mr. Bart missed a story because he was out having a three-martini lunch.
And the nature of the internet beast is that your performance is immediately evaluated. Your stock goes up or down accordingly. You can't hide behind quarterly or year-end averages. You can't blame the editor or sales department. It makes you immediately autonomous, and hence accountable and responsible. And yes, of course they must be conscious of hits to some degree - would you fault a CEO for being conscious of her company's profit/loss margins? Would you fault anyone who is self-employed that keeps track of their accounts? It's part of the job description.
The internet means up to the minute news, and professional bloggers are living and working on the edge - of technology, of time, and of their professions.
Mr. B's subtext seemed to be about shoring up his own self-confidence in the midst of radical techno-change. Reminded me of the grandfather in Moonstruck, who goes out walking with all the dogs and howls at the moon, and in that last scene, when everyone is congregating in the kitchen and he starts to cry, and says, "I'm so confused!" And who hasn't had techno learning-curve-ball moments like that?
Maybe Mr. B. is on the outside looking in, his nose pressed up against the window of the blogger party, and it's translating into a bitter vibe. And is he surrounded by yes-persons? Friends don't allow friends to print antiquated diatribes. Isn't that a bumper sticker?
Methinks its time for an intervention, V-staffers. Show Mr. B. some tough love and teach that man how to blog. (just don't give him a comments sections right away, just in case some crazy mofo wants to shred him like yesterday's, um, Variety. Baby steps...)
another long comment - sorry.
Posted by: seenmyverite? at September 25, 2007 09:05 AM
Thing is, BiP, as much as you admire Variety, their dominance is no longer a gimme. They run very little news, as such. Almost everything in the entertainment universe is driven by press releases disguised as tips or exclusive info. It's always been that way, but in a world of alternative options, Variety is less and the less the release point of choice.
On the flip side, Variety, as others are, is too smart and is appropriated interested in their long-term reputation to just run gossip fed to them by interested parties, which is pretty much the entirity of what Nikki Finke does.
Nikki's blog is the current first choice of agents because it is where they can have their way with the dispersal of info. Where does that leave, quite specifically, LA Times columnists who relied more on agents tipping them than anyone else? Who is going to take their dirty laundry to Kim Masters when they can get Nikki to post it without even taking a serious whiff of it?
And the trades? 90% reliant on revenue from studio advertising. Nature of the beast. Are they really going to walk hard against the studios? No.
I don't want to make fun of Bart for being an old man. But he is still in the game of leveraging his once-more-distinct advantage over others in covering this industry while not being able or willing to deliver what the niche platers, like Nikki, can when they are not concerned about making rent by selling studios ads.
And when he pisses on the web, you can be sure that it will be a less friendly place for his news outlet. Part of MCN's foundation is not taking things out on people for non-news issues... we will run what is first or best every time and with Variety's wall down, the quality of that resource is improved. But when, as recently happened, they steal news from a major web site without credit... which now happens often... well, they can expect to be called on it and devalued just that small fraction each time they disrespect others who have earned it.
Bart is fortunate to have someone like Anne Thompson who actually likes the web and believes in community. But even her linking seems to have tightened up a bit since being under the Variety masthead.
Mostly, it is time for the egos to be left at the door and for all good men and women to fight on the ground on which their transports dropped 'em. Variety has done that in their fight with The Hollywood Reporter. But the web is a much tougher and flexible target.
Posted by: David Poland at September 25, 2007 12:24 PM
COMMENT REMOVED - Please refer to entry "I Removed A Comment"
Posted by: adman35 at September 25, 2007 07:20 PM
Nice job, adman.. you just gave Nikki Finke her big story for Wednesday.
BTW, to clarify something I wrote earlier, I don't consider David to be a "blogger" even though he has a blog, nor do I lump Jeffrey Wells or Sasha or Tom O'Neil into that crowd, because they all do a lot more than "blog." I'm talking more about the DIYers who think they have something worthwhile to say with their opinion (which is generally not too different from any other opinion out there and not anything particularly new or interesting) but can't actually get a job or design their own website which offers any kind of original spin. The Blogosphere has made it a lot easier for them to vent and make them feel that their opinion is that much more important.
Posted by: EDouglas at September 25, 2007 08:46 PM
Edoug, perhaps some people just like to write and to have a place to write their opinions without building a business around it and learning everything about IT and webpage design in order to do it.
Posted by: KamikazeCamelV2.0 at September 26, 2007 02:57 AM
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