Blogging in the New York Times
Browsing the New York Times, I came across an interesting article about the first serious malware infection to travel through the social networks, “Koobface.” The byline? Sarah Perez. Next to the byline? ReadWriteWeb, the blog where she’s one of a team of authors. Not just the words, mind you, but the logo, with a link to the blog. The article wasn’t a ReadWriteWeb post, so this doesn’t mean the Times is syndicating blog posts. But it is hiring bloggers as journalists and promoting them on the basis of their blogger fame. Not hugely surprising, of course, but I find it an interesting hybrid of the centralized newspaper and decentralized blogger models. Many people have blogged their way into a new career. Many journalists have picked up side jobs as bloggers, switched over to blogging entirely, or used blogging to build a personal brand separate from where they publish commercially. For bloggers to pick up jobs as part-time journalists just adds one new layer to that web.
Comments (One comment)
Like you said, hardly surprising. This also mirrors the “food chain” of comics, in which self-published minicomic and webcomic creators get picked up by indie publishing houses, and well-established indie creators turn to making superhero comics for a “day job” (hardly a bad day job, I think). But like blogging, it works both ways – folks who got their name at DC Comics or even an animation company like Pixar will publish through indie houses when they want full ownership and control of their work, and to be able to do something perhaps not so genrefied.
Centralized models have their uses. That’s why we have a government – one big, central organ of community decision-making and enforcement that keeps everything running. Decentralized, personally-controlled models tend to give the greatest quality, but they do so by having no quality control at all – so along with the greatest quality, we get the worst stuff, too, and as any webcomics reader will attest, the bad stuff outnumbers the good stuff greatly. For every XKCD or Perry Bible Fellowship, there’s a mountain of generic garbage out there, a great steaming dung-heap of people who tried, but just weren’t very good. But how likely is it that XKCD could have gotten syndicated in newspapers? Even in independent weeklies, the chance would’ve been low. Stick figure comics are the definition of “doesn’t sell.” But XKCD simply wouldn’t be the same without stick figures.
So decentralized models are necessary to let the best stuff through, and to give everyone a fair shake. More centralized models are necessary for reliability, consistency, which is why we have a central government instead of a bunch of decentralized lawmaking and enforcement authorities.
Interesting stuff, hmm?
AnjaFlower / December 25th, 2008, 6:15 pm / #
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