Full of ourselves

There’s a lot of doomsaying on blogs.

For the past few days I’ve been tossing a little newsblog aggregation idea around in my head---something not terribly unlike Battelle’s Federated Media, but I just can’t see it working.

In a nutshell, the idea would be to capitalize on the declining faith in major media and the rising tide of blog-style “news” coverage. There are, I’ve concluded, a number of reasons this wouldn’t work, not the least of which that there just isn’t much of a market---not to mention the difficulty (espeically given the new debate around who owns my content?) of designing a service that has no content generation itself. In essense, the idea consists mostly of taking what other people write, and pointing to it. How much leeway can I reasonably expect when dealing with content I really don’t own? And if I monetize their content, aren’t the creators entitled to a certain amount?

Creating a site that aggregates, in a news-site style, the content of hundreds of freelance “citizen journalists,” categorizes their work and localizes it for various regions is certainly a cool idea. And it may even be useful.

But to suggest it as a viable alternative to the news media? Not going to happen.

Bloggers (myself included) are full of themselves. It’s a somewhat unfortunate side-effect of the way the blogosphere is set up: you’ve got to say big things to be heard, and to be believed, you have to be ten hundred percent right.

Doomsaying is one of the most popular things. The most popular bloggers are, quite often, proclaiming the early (or impending) demise of some industry or another. Jeff Jarvis will often talk about how media itself is being re-written, or how magazines are making wrong decisions. But, as far as the numbers go, magazines are doing fine. News media is changing, yes; but it’s not being replaced.

Tom Evslin wrote an article (a good one, too) on how vertical integration is dead. But at the same time I’m watching a massive move in the entertainment industry towards re-integration on a vertical level. Movie studios that were for years barred from owning their own theaters now do so again (Disney has it’s own theaters, which means they have in-studio ability to draft, write, produce, distribute, and present a movie. Oh they also have TV stations. That’s start to finish production. If that isn’t vertical integration, what is?) And let’s not forget Yahoo! — quickly moving into the field of media and content production like no other Web company, it seems to be snaking roots up and down through the production chain. Again, Tom: Doomsaying.

We need to remember that those of us who blog, in fact those of use who really, actively use the internet are marginal cases. We tend to use the services we find avidly and so frequently that it seems silly to us for others not to find value in them. Why would people read a magazine if they can get WIRED features online? Or better yet, read accounts from “real people” on blogs?

In short, a lot of the blogosphere is (if you’re a cynic) “as bad as” or (if you’re not) “more ludicrous” than the existing major media. After all, the blogosphere is really just one large collection of opinions. Unbiased news just isn’t much of a reality, and at least in your local Times the spelling errors are missing.