The New Yorker putting online in its place - online

Nick Lemann of the New Yorker caught my eye on Frontline saying something that I interpreted as bloggers are generally unoriginal and reprocess things. I couldn't backtrack to catch his exact soundbite because I was watching it my new HD setup which I can't (yet) rewind like standard-def. But it prompted me to fire up my mac.

"We" (not the royal we, I'm speaking for myself) are admittedly low on humility and have the hubris to think people actually read this stuff.

Nobody would confuse my little place on the net with a church newsletter. Don't confuse this with an attack on Mr. Lemann. Frontline's viewpoint (a/k/a spin) lit the fuse on this one as much as insomnia.

I think bloggers cut through (and/or expose) as much crap as they produce. I also don't deny the signal to noise ratio is worse than that of the New York Times.

Traditional media DOES shy away from things depending on what its brand managers say about its target market. Traditional media DOES shy away from things depending on what its lawyers say about the target of its reporting.

The rarefied world owned by ill-mannered wealthy dinosaurs like Mel Karmazin is undoubtedly being squeezed in its tender bits. The little guy has more of an opportunity to compete with the Prada-clothed devils with the ad dollar connections than ever. It's a free market. One can only coast along so much based on brand identity. I don't have the momentum that comes with an army of fact checkers, researchers, attorneys and marketing boffins who lunch with their ad-agency counterparts.

I googled and the New Yorker reference that I think the Frontline journalists decided to include as a sound bite came up in a couple of seconds - just like in theory anyone could google and land on my writings.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060807fa_fact1

Big media takes itself too seriously. The above link is opinion labeled as fact. The internet gives the average citizen nearly the same capabilities to publish and disseminate "media." The average joe has more ability than ever to communicate just like magazines that live and die by their individual scans at the point of sale, corporations that operate in "the public interest" as licensees of very expensive radio spectrum and newspapers that are 75% regurgitated content from the wires put in a local wrapper. The average joe doesn't have the overhead of Betacams/DVcams, uplinks, printing presses and patent royalty payments to the algorithm owners of content management systems.

It's not an accident that Cisco owns Scientific-Atlanta.

This writer is not snowed by the Manhattan-based media conglomerates. Lots still are - which is also a part of media momentum - but that number is slowly eroding. Y'all have your place and a much-greater ability to verify what you publish - but with the budget comes a spin. It's obvious when you have access to multiple media sources in your home. I can switch from 60 Minutes to 48 Hours to NBC Nightly news - and then break out of the box and watch BBC World, TV España, TV Globo and the nightly news shows from across Latin America. I know I'm missing out on Euronews because my apartment balcony's view of the southern sky is blocked by a tree. It's not worth it to have a dish on the roof for it because the amount of content in languages I understand emanating from 95 degrees west is limited anyway.

Those sources are very different from the syndicated stuff I see in the mainstream US media.

In the US the power of big media and its spin is fading away as the options grow. Options are good even though they squeeze at the number of times your magazine gets scanned at the point of sale. I read between the lines during your 90-odd seconds on Frontline. Point blank Condé Nast's (the New Yorker's owner) ad dollars are being squeezed - which is one of the key facts behind that opinion which is labeled as fact. But if internet authors are to be poo-poohed, why does your page load include DART - a laser-targeted internet source of ad revenue? It's sorta having it both ways :) DART is the essence of Internet 2.0.

What's DART? It's a breed of little-known technology that impacts the bottom line of your web browser as well as the bottom line of traditional media brands. Readers, watch that bottom line of your browser for the word "doubleclick." That URL that flits by is one that you won't visit directly. The well-known search engines won't feed it back to you. It's not the only one - just a big player in Internet 2.0. It's a survivor from Internet 1.0. Look at the date on this article: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=198511

There could be ads in my page load too. My revenue would be measured in pennies, not dollars - for now. Naturally my value per impression is a lot lower. It just depends how much time and effort I put into it as well as a lot of luck. My eyes are wide open

There's room for a lot of players, opinions and facts in the US marketplace. It'll be interesting to see how this new aspect of free-market competition for impressions play out.

Hopefully my regurgitation of the meme I picked up from Frontline measures up. ;)