I do wish that Mark Gimein will start blogging: he’s a natural. He’s provocative,
and interesting, and – at least until the final
entry of his guest-blogging stint at Time – unafraid to write long.
(This is your own place, Mark! If you want to write long, feel free!) But he
has a vision of "online journalism bifurcat[ing] into reporting and commentary",
with blogging in the latter category and serious journalism in the former. What
he misses is the hugely important fact that most bloggers are not journalists,
and have no desire to be journalists. And that as a result, the quality of public
discourse, certainly in the finance and economics space, has improved immeasurably.
I defy Mark to find a single journalist in the next month who will write as
lucidly and as comprehensively about this year’s Nobel
Prize winners in economics as Tyler and Alex over at Marginal Revolution
did in the space of a couple of hours. There aren’t any newspaper or magazine
journalists who are better on international capital flows than Brad
Setser, or the housing market than Capital Calculated
Risk, or urbanism than Streetsblog
– the list is almost endless. If you have a quick look at my econoblogsphere,
you’ll find that journalists are definitely in the minority – and that’s
a very good thing indeed.
These bloggers aren’t in it for the money. Every once in a while a blog like
will really take off, and start bringing in non-negligible amounts of cash for
its founders. But Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok are both tenured professors,
and they didn’t found the blog for the money. If you look at Mark Thoma’s hugely
successful Economists’
View blog, you’ll see that it carries no advertising whatsoever. Mark undoubtedly
gets a lot of benefit from it, but not in the form of cashflow.
Which brings me to Jeff Bercovici’s idea that the founders of the Huffington
Post shouldn’t
profit from their writers’ efforts. I disagree: Arianna Huffington and Ken
Lerer are performing a very valuable service, which was funded largely with
venture capital, and there’s no reason why their hard work and vision shouldn’t
be profitable for them and their investors. Jeff seems to think that HuffPo
its bloggers jealously:
The real test of Arianna Huffington’s commitment to digital democracy and
online community and all that jazz is what happens when some no-name HuffPo
blogger breaks out, acquires a following, and decides he wants to migrate
his blog elsewhere on the web so he can own his own traffic and brand. Will
she wish him a gracious fare-thee-well when he goes from serf to neighboring
landholder?
I haven’t asked Arianna about this personally, but yes, of course
she would wish such a blogger a gracious fare-thee-well. If HuffPo can really
help create new bloggy celebrities, then that only serves to emphasize the value
which her site is capable of adding. Of course her bloggers could all host their
own blogs on Typepad or Blogger or WordPress, and the famous ones would probably
get a decent readership in the form of fans. But they get orders of magnitude
more readers on HuffPo – and if there’s one thing that bloggers want,
it’s readers. Mark Thoma’s not blogging for money, but I can guarantee he wouldn’t
blog as assiduously as he does if his only readers were a handful of friends
and family.
The genius of HuffPo is that it’s a real positive-sum game. The bloggers get
much more in the way of readership on HuffPo than they ever would on their own.
That means the "no-name" bloggers have a much greater chance of breaking
out and becoming "name" bloggers if they can get HuffPo to publish
their thoughts. And as those bloggers increase the volume of content on the
HuffPo site, the site itself becomes inceasingly popular and valuable.
The HuffPo business model actually makes more sense than, say, the Gawker Media
business model, where you increase your amount of content by paying people to
work incredibly hard. Vanessa
Grigoriadis reports that even Gawker Media might be moving towards more
of a user-generated-content model:
The success of the comments has even made Denton rethink the compensation
he pays his bloggers, the cows he has to pay for milk. Gawker as an automated
message board, with commenters generating exponentially greater numbers of
page views as they click all over the site to see reactions to their comments,
could be the dream. There would then be no editors to pay, even at the rates
he has to shell out.
For all that blogs are becoming increasingly mainstream, the number of people
who get a regular and predictable paycheck for blogging is still tiny. That
number will rise, but it will never come close to the number of people who get
a regular and predictable paycheck for old-fashioned reporting. In most of the
blogosphere, the incentives and the rewards for generating content are very,
very different from what is found in old-media companies.