Fast flipping through Google this morning tripped the dread alert. The consumer culture was strutting its stuff amid the apocalyptic economic landscape and I was reminded of a line of thought regarding NewMatilda. Sure NM suffered occasionally from ordinary writing or facile arguments but one of its strengths was the plurality of opinions. It provided a soapbox for people who ordinarily might have anonymously blogged about something and that message had a chance to reach a larger audience. It also paid a skeleton staff and some of its contributors.
By comparison, Crikey is a fully professional publication and it shows, the writers, the ads, the presentation etc but such professionalism costs money. Meanwhile, blogs like LarvatusProdeo that have an associated commentariat, throw up a topic and get a variety of opinions but at the end of the day their broad appeal (an hence their market reach) is limited. It generates debate amongst a few and the process is enabling for those voices who come to LP looking for a left of centre perspective. NM seems to sit somewhere between Crikey and say the blogs like LP as a very cheaply run professional organisation that offered a regular-ish publication schedule, a more polished look and paid for some of its content. Interestingly its feedback or comments were less numerous than say LP which seems to suggest that people who go to LP do so to engage in the debates, whereas the Crikey and NM reader is more passive.
Now it also seems to me that the silent majority like their news and opinions pre-packaged because the mainstream media has been delivering it this way for some time and the hordes seem to accept that as a legitimate form of information. Debating sites such as LP or Anonymous Lefty argue a position vigorously but does this have any substantial effect on public opinion in general? On the other hand Crikey mightn’t generate as much debate on its main site but is it more broadly influential? I suppose it boils down to whether you think its politics or Politics.
Anyway these musing have a point. Mark at LP hinted at some moves to pick up the slack potentially left by NM’s expected demise. It could be an aggregation site like the Domain. The advantage of aggregators, like Google FastFlip or The Domain, is that they simply collect what’s already there, package it up neatly and give advertisers a bigger target. The cost of aggregating is relatively minor since things like RSS are geared towards such syndication and the headline front page virtually self edits.
But there’s a down side and it relates to the people actually generating the content in the first place, the writers. Now there are two fairly distinct categories of bloggers or writers. Some grab a topic, a quote or some news and post a paragraph or two offering some particular point of view supporting or criticising the original item. Quick, simple. Others like to structure an argument in detail, some of them actually do a bit of research, and their contribution is usually longer and the language can be more dense. It boils down to time.
Now if no one is getting paid for their time or if the pay is not a reflection of the time spent, ie by article rather than by length, then such a market situation is likely to lead to a dearth of in-depth writing. That is not to say that good writers wont write or that good in depth stuff wont occasionally make its way into the public domain, but it is to say that the tendency will be for more quick and dirty postings that rely on the audience to debate the issues.
Again some might see this as a good thing. But it does pose a few problems, not the least being the financial situation for writers. One issue that comes to my mind revolves around the business model. Let’s say an aggregation site is successful in its aims to deliver a variety of interesting content to a suitable number of eyeball, the sites generate lots of public debate, people fire off their comments and everyone seems happy. The advertisers see a potential market and plonk down so dough, the hosting company gets their bit and the owners of the site are happily turning over a profit. But what is the source of their content? Other sites, and if they are relying on voluntary guest posts or free quick and dirty little one liners, the bulk of the content is actually supplied by the public to the sites for FREE. In other words the audience who generates the content that drives the aggregators which in turn enables the advertisers to ply them, the audience, with ads. And the business that puts the deal together collects the loot.
Whether or not those businesses then decide that quality matters in their content is up for grabs. It might be that business comes first which risks undermining the public concerns about the future of journalism and writing often expressed in these very forums.
just my 2c.
