BuzzMachine

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

The fewer the merrier?

9 comments on The fewer the merrier?

The fewer the merrier?
: Aaron Bailey quotes the increasingly clueless John Dvorak thusly:

“…This trend is solid. A look at Columbia Journalism Review’s recent listing of traditional-media blogs shows everyone getting into the act: ABC News, FOX, National Review, The New Republic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, and so on. The blogging boosters, meanwhile, are rooting like high-school cheerleaders over this development. To them, it’s some sort of affirmation. In fact, it’s a death sentence. The onerous Big Media incursion marks the beginning of the end for blogging. Can you spell co-opted?”

9 responses to “The fewer the merrier?”

  1. tom mangan Avatar
    tom mangan

    Question re news being a conversation: What makes people get interactive?
    We need to know this to know which way we’re going w/interactive news.
    You get over a thousand visitors a day and maybe a dozen comments … I get 350 a day and barely a trickle of comments …. I’ve seen major media sites that get zillions of hits but have paltry user participation in user forums.
    Other side of the coin is that chatrooms & IM are way, way popular. So how do news orgs encourage chat-style participation?
    I guess at the very least we need to know what discourages feedback and go from there.

  2. tom Avatar
    tom

    Oops, a correx: the buzzmachine hitcounter reads over 5,000 a day… and just when I thought I was closing in. Also quite a few more comments than I remembered the last time… but still a pretty small fraction of the visitor count.

  3. Charlie Avatar
    Charlie

    I wouldn’t worry about Dvorak too much, Jeff. he’s got a long history of being wrong on practically everything.

  4. Mike G Avatar
    Mike G

    Yeah, once big media gets in nobody pays attention to you little bloggers. For instance, did you know that before Terry Neal of the Washington Post became world-famous as the author of “Talking Points,” that title was actually used by some blogger named Joshua something or other?

  5. Sean Kirby Avatar
    Sean Kirby

    I’ve always said – the more corporate, big media involvement, the better. If anything, it’s the elitists of academia and journalism schools which threaten to co-opt blogging – precisely by excluding certain forms of it from consideration.
    But of course, they don’t believe in free markets anyway.

  6. Jeff Jarvis Avatar
    Jeff Jarvis

    Tom:
    I’ve never been concerned about higher proportion of posting. People who read also interact. And in the weblog world, people who link interact! So you can’t measure interaction just by counting comments or posts. At Advance.net, we can get up to a million page views in a single day in a single forum in a single market and thousands of posts; that’s highly interactive no matter how you measure it. Some want to read; some have something to say. And by any measurement, this is already FAR more interactive than newspapers or TV or even talk radio.

  7. tom Avatar
    tom

    Jeff: good points; and there’s the fact that some people just aren’t comfortable writing, even if they may be comfortable reading. And they are intimidated by some people’s ability to say pithy or entertaining stuff and they fear they can’t measure up. And to some extent it’s a good thing that maybe 10 percent of Web users actually talk back to the medium — just think how much noisier it gets if that proportion rises. And people do talk with their clicks, for sure, but sentences are easier to read. I just wonder if there are structural roadblocks that could be removed to encourage more people to participate.

  8. SharpShooter Avatar
    SharpShooter

    Recall, too, that many people cannot touch-type, hence even a small comment becomes a nightmare of groping, hunting and pecking… And to say what? “Yeah, I feel that way, too.”
    The reading/writing world of humanity is, as our Founding Fathers credited us, remarkably intelligent individually and collectively. We make mistrakes, and learn from our efforts. (Hey! We don’t LIKE THIS outcome… Let’s go for another!)
    So the jury may be out on FUTURE IMPACTS of blogging, but I assert that the impacts to-date are already visible, significant and undeniable.
    “From two ranks amongst mankind hath power been seized… kings and ecclesiastics.”
    “I have given power to the people.”
    May we use it wisely.

  9. Steve A Avatar
    Steve A

    If you are the only person in the world with a fax machine, then it is worthless. However, if you are one of the only two people with a fax machine it is extremely valuable. Not just because you have control over the messages being sent, but also because you can select which of the messages that you receive to disseminate.
    I