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Blogs Are Eating Tech Media Alive
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jul 17, 2007 01:45 AM
from the wagging-the-dog dept.
from the wagging-the-dog dept.
Heinz writes with an article in Forbes on how advertising in tech media is drying up and going — where else? — into specialist blogs and Google. "Silicon Valley is booming again. But if you work in tech media, there's blood on the floor. Take Red Herring. It hung onto its offices after getting the eviction notice earlier this month. But gossip site Valleywag is breaking story after story not just on its beat — but about its woes. Meanwhile, bigger publications are hurting too: Time Warner's Business 2.0 saw ad pages drop 21.8% through March from the same period a year ago; PC Magazine's editor in chief walked out the door after ad pages fell 38.8% over the same period; and one-time online powerhouse CNET is reporting growing losses even as the companies it covers flourish. It may be happening in tech first, but there's no reason the same thing won't happen, eventually, in every media niche."
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They waste money on editors (Score:5, Funny)
Re:They waste money on editors (Score:5, Insightful)
--
QuantumG seems like a guy who is bitter he isn't in the same position.
Re:They waste money on editors (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They waste money on editors (Score:5, Interesting)
More broadly, mass media on the whole sucks. And now that it's possible for anyone to produce media, the suck monopoly is broken. There are a lot of sucky tech blogs out there, just like there's lots of bad video on you tube and crappy bands competing for attention on MySpace. Why buy mass media crap or read mass media crap when there is all this other crap? The mainstream can't compete with this inundation of crap, at least not without offering a quality product. And what are the chances of that?
Re:They waste money on editors (Score:5, Interesting)
While I agree with almost everything that has been said by posters in this thread, no-one has yet commented on the round that was lethal. Most tech news sites are indeed full of ad-ridden republished press releases edited by people who are technically incompetent. Most tech blogs are indeed full of poorly written "commentary" with no original research. However, with so many blogs around, there are bound to be a few really good ones, which do offer thoughtful commentary, deep understanding of the issues covered, previously hard-to-find information, and/or original research.
Such blogs also tend to link to other worthwhile source material by their nature. In addition, blogs typically support comments, or more usefully full-blown web forums, mailing lists or Usenet groups. The combination means informed people can share knowledge and ideas once the scene has been set by the good bloggers, and I imagine that most discerning geeks, having found a few such blogs as starting points, simply have no need to bother with the numerous low-quality sites any more. I know I don't...
Re:Anyone remember BYTE ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you read anything the the Byte editors wrote about the end of the magazine? Tom Halfhill's Tom's Unofficial BYTE FAQ: The Death of BYTE Magazine [halfhill.com]? The advertising was drying up well before CMP purchased McGraw-Hill technology publications (including B
Re:They waste money on editors (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The readers of tech sites know how to block ads. Heck I have so many wildcards in my ad blocking software that many times when I go to a new site I don't see any ads.
2. They place ads in such a say as to demand that they are blocked. When they put the ad in the middle of the text that screams BLOCK ME NOW. And while your at it use a wild card. Also any ads that use Flash are also just asking to be blocked. I have to wonder if these people are just clueless or what? The real shame is that in print I value the ads. They are less intrusive and I often seek them out. On the Internet they tend to get into the way. Google ads are the exception.
3. Lack of depth. Back in the good old days of Byte, Micro, Dr Dobbs, and Computer language the articles where great and in depth. Byte has articles on making your own EEG, SBC, and even how to make your own PC. When I mean make your own PC I mean actually making the motherboard not getting the latest form ASUS. Most articles these days are on which Core2Duo motherboard will let you over clock the cpu
4. Web 2.0 Frankly between my.yahoo, iGoogle, and Slashdot I don't need to read any tech site every day.
5. Bad journalism. This is the real killer. Why can't they stop trying to write flame bait?
Re:They waste money on editors (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you picked up a magazine lately? They're getting much, much worse. Ads that span 4 pages. Just about every article split-up into pieces. And they all seem to be getting worse.
Popular Mechanics is the worst I've seen. There is literally no difference between content and ads. An advertisement may be a column of text talking about a product, written exactly like the rest of their articles, in the middle of a page with actual articles. Perhaps they're just "forward thinking" and an example of the future for all other magazines.
I hope you mean just the ads on google.com, because use of Google's Adwords seems to be getting worse... A huge horizontal column of text ads across the top of the screen, a huge vertical column of text ads squeezing the body down to half the size, another section of text ads in the middle of the article you're reading, and every other word double under-lined and displaying a huge pop-up over the page if your mouse should accidentally pass over it. You'd think Google would have some bare minimum standards as to how their service gets used.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Not blogs, but forums (Score:5, Insightful)
Blogs are great for some stuff, but forums are just killing the tech magazines, and the special interest stuff.
Re:Not blogs, but forums (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Not blogs, but forums (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps the biggest advantage for blogs over traditional tech magazines would be product reviews, in my opinion. An online reviewer with dozens of user-posted comments is more reliable than a single possibly advertiser-paid reviewer.
Re:Not blogs, but forums (Score:5, Funny)
So while blogs are eating tech media alive, forums prefer to have tech media medium rare topped with firewire sauce, with a side of tarballs and microchips, washed down with a glass of wine... or something like that.
Re:Not blogs, but forums (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Found it: http://www.google.com/ [google.com]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Would have worked if they had solved the spammer/flamer/lamer problems that come with an un-moderated system like Usenet.
Most forums that I have seen are readable and searchable without the
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Good (Score:4, Interesting)
Regardless, there is room for non-journal coverage of "STEM." Popular Mechanics? Awful. Popular Science?
Pretty bad. New Scientist? Not Bad. Scientific American? Good. There are also things like Invention &
Technology. While I've not subscribed in recent years, last I checked it did a pretty good job at telling
stories of STS.
STEM=Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (apparently the latest buzz-acronym in education)
STS =Science, Technology & Society.
Re:Good (Score:4, Funny)
That's terrible! The government will probably confuse it with STEM cells and cut off funding.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good (Score:4, Insightful)
I write for a (non-tech) magazine. From the time I finish an article, email it to them and have it show up at my door in the magazine it's about 4 months. And scarcely anything in the magazine cannot be found on the net or an answer can be found to any question the magazine might answer.
Print media is dying. That's news?
They sure look purdy on my bookshelf though.
And when they pretend to be bloggers too (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the funniest part is when the tech media starts publishing most of their articles on the "weblogs" section of their site. Like InformationWeek's 2 recent lamentable and much trashed articles about GPLv3.
Re: (Score:2)
This won't decrease the amount of advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with this culture that a few good old biblical stoning parties wouldn't fix.
Re:This won't decrease the amount of advertising (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This won't decrease the amount of advertising (Score:4, Informative)
Block "*googlesyndication.com*" and "*google-analytics.com*" to get rid of 99% of AdWord ads.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They offer so little (Score:5, Interesting)
It was sad to see most of the serious newspapers dry up, leaving nothing but wire fed papers that write to a 4th grade reading level.
It was sad to see local radio stations dry up, leaving nothing but Clear Channel fed recordings from Texas.
However, I have few tears for crappy magazines and their equally vapid online "portals" that never offered much in the first place.
The real issue is that we've sold off the Fourth Estate to advertisers, and we have very little real journalism left. We're all fed our news from the same ~5 mega corps who own everything. We are not informed because we gave up our media to capitalism, which works well as a way to price widgets, but is not really very good at providing truth. It only knows how to provide marketing spin.
Bloggers could provide some respite, but the Internet provides little in terms of a reputation system. Anyone can shout down unpopular truths, and any group can astroturf their marketing messages. Few people who follow Digg or Reddit links verify the credibility of sources they visit.
We've traded our serious tradition of journalism for a cheap bit of daily entertainment from who knows where and a media buffet prepared by a market driven media.
The fact that the least fit portions of our capitalist replacement for journalism are struggling to survive should be expected. The fact that our media is being run like a free market is the real story.
RoughlyDrafted Magazine [roughlydrafted.com]
Re: (Score:3)
The problem is editorial, not structural (Score:5, Insightful)
What do readers want? These days, a little fucking truth would help. I think we're all sick of the clear commercial bias inherent in all these supposed tech reviews and bullshit 'secretly sponsored opinion'. The same is happening in professional news. TV and cable news viewership is down. WAY DOWN. Why is that? Because they don't offer news.
When these 'tech journals' hire a few more reporters and start publishing real news, you'll see their readers and advertisers follow right back. Because, frankly, the blog-0-sphere offers no substantial news reporting either.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I lik
Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot is really a glorified blog. It aggregates news sources from all over, stories that its members think are interesting. But without the original sources that generate these stories -- media outlets who pay writers to produce stories -- outlets like Slashdot disappear.
You claim that readers want "a little fucking truth." Fair enough. But, by definition, Slashdot isn't in a position to generate anything but "a little fucking opinion." And you can't hate on it for doing so. That's what it's here for.
I spent three years as a senior editor at InfoWorld, and I certainly have a lot of criticisms to offer about the tech trade media industry. But I can say, with absolute certainty, that when trade media outlets like InfoWorld disappear you will all be sorry.
It goes against almost every fiber of my cynical being to say this, but your subject heading is full of shit. The problem is one hundred percent structural, zero percent editorial.
There has never been a tech reporter who has picked his baggy-eyed head up off a table and blurted out, "You know what? We need to do more stories about the iPhone." Not one. Editors might think that a 300-story onslaught about the iPhone sounds like a good idea, but only because we have people breathing down our necks, too -- people who are beholden to bullshit metrics like hit counts, which look a whole like hard statistics, but are infinitely less reliable than the reader surveys that they used to conduct on newspaper readers.
The good tech reporters who have stuck with this industry know what they're talking about. They write the stories that blogs like Slashdot link to. They might get it wrong from time to time -- fine. You're all there to call them on it. But they're still providing a valuable service.
What's really wrong with this industry is the same thing that's wrong with every industry -- the willingness to suck cock for money. If you're putting out a blog, and somebody offers you an opportunity to make a lot of money -- money, you gloatingly think, that won't be spent on a mainstream tech media outlet -- shame on you. The only reason that company was able to buy a story is because you sold it to them. Hope you brushed your teeth afterward.
You can pull a statistic out your ass that says the readership is all going to blogs. Fine. But can you really blame the management of the media outlets when they hear something like that? The answer is predictable: More blogs.
Blogs on blogs on blogs. It's great! Blogs don't cost us anything and readers trust blogs more than they do reporters, so screw the reporters' salaries and let's hire more bloggers. The answer is more corporate blogs. And folks like you eat it up.
Yeah, you heard me right. Is the media industry going to shit? Corporate media is on the blame list, for sure. But first on the list is you. Have you ever written your Congressman? Probably not. But even if you have, it's probably futile to ask that you write to your favorite media outlets and ask -- even beg -- them to cover real news, and not just fluff pieces and fake stories.
Media outlets cover bullshit because the metrics tell them that bullshit is what people want, plain and simple.
Hell, the only reason that I still read Slashdot (check out my user ID) is because the demographic of the stories is so narrow that I can guarantee that 5/6 of the stories posted are about something I'm at least slightly interested in. I bet that's not true for half the Slashdot readers, though.
Yes, the world of media is going to shit. Yes, I hate it. Damned if I can do anything about it on my own, though.
Re:Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
No, Slashdot is a glorified discussion forum. The discussion topics (news) is user submitted (albiet with editor assistance) and user moderated - it's not some random cat on the net spouting off about whatever and pining for attention, it's a large audience of participants interacting with each other. As long as the topics are relevant to the geek audience, I don't think it would much matter where they come from... indeed many links have been to purely amateur sources and projects as opposed to professional media.
My niche publishing market is safe (Score:2)
No way the interwebs will take THAT away from me.
ads, not articles (Score:4, Insightful)
Fair and unbiased reporting (Score:2)
"Upside" went bust, too. (Score:5, Informative)
A few years ago, Upside magazine went bust. Since I own Downside [downside.com], I looked into buying their domain, but the assets of Upside were eventually acquired by another tech publishing firm. The article didn't mention Upside, although they mentioned The Industry Standard and Business 2.0, which also tanked.
We also lost Silicon Valley's newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News. It's been purchased by an outfit that runs cheesy suburban throwaways, and is being brought down to that level. It's still published, but nobody cares.
And Murdoch is buying the Wall Street Journal. Soon, there will be very few information sources that actually go out and dig out news.
Obligatory (Score:5, Interesting)
No, wait -- that's not what I mean at all. In fact, I mourn the loss of proper technical journalism in the world. Nobody bothers actually reviewing a product, or rendering an original opinion anymore.
Instead, we get twelve pages of ads, with only sixteen paragraphs of whitewash [wikipedia.org], er, ahem, content spread amongst them.
I miss seeing reviews produced by competent and well-qualified people about things other than the latest 7800GTX repack. Just try to find useful comparison information on printers, monitors, keyboards, or even simple mice. These products are the human interface for the machine and are therefore among the most important facets of it, but unless it's twice as expensive as it should be and is intended for a child's gaming rig then there will be no reviews of it in the blogs.
There's a thousand disparate e-commerce reviews to wade through, sure, but at least they're typically honest. Blog entries (if you can find one related) all lack any semblance of depth or integrity.
The dead-tree derivatives like C|Net and the remains of Ziff-Davis aren't any better these days, as they flail about trying to copy their blog competitor's attention-deficit formatting and lack of editorial oversight, managing only to add more misery to their already inevitable death.
Absolutely nobody ever bothers setting up repeatable tests for comparative measurement of anything in this century unless it can be done in the form of a Quake benchmark. And even then, products offering 1-2% gain for the low-low price of $200 more than everything else in the review are proclaimed to be the "clear winner" by some spineless high-school kid who is afraid to write a bad review for fear that XFX or MSI or whoever will turn off the free hardware spigot in retaliation.
The fact that I find Amazon and Newegg customer reviews by the clueless masses to be some of the most meaningful and useful information available makes me feel like we've lost something important. It's probably gone forever.
I, for one, am not very happy about it.
Maybe it's bad reporting (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with sites like cnet is that they can't decide who their audience is. If they want to pitch their writing to the general public then they probably should stick with reviewing the iPhone and stay far away from stories about Linus's comments on the GPL3 or the latest groklaw controversy but the mainstream media has that pretty well covered. On the other hand if they want to appeal to people who are more informed about this stuff then dumbing it down and spending the whole time giving context just won't work.
Maybe the problem is they hired journalism majors with a bit of tech knowledge rather than tech guys who can write reasonably. That's the right strategy for the NYT tech section not cnet. I dunno.
The next story submission reads (Score:3, Funny)
from the advertising-in-tech-media-is-drying-up dept.
CmdrTaco writes with articles from various specialist blogs covering the closing of Slashdot and its affiliates, due to the large decrease in ad revenue that has moved on to real blogs with commentary consisting of real substance and editorial content, instead of Soviet Russia, Netcraft, All your base, you must be new here, natalie portman, and other internet memes. Users will have two weeks to burn all their Karma, and subscribers will be priveledged to know that their remaining subscriptions will pay for the editors' unemployment.
> slashdot, memes, karmaburning, yes, no, wontsomeonethinkofthechildren (tagging beta)
Scary Trend (Score:3, Insightful)
I read articles in the New York Times and other major newspapers with a warm and fuzzy notion that the journalist that wrote the piece - even if not totally unbiased - has done some honest, well-funded research and has some authority on the topic at hand. If the news print media were to vanish and be replaced by endless streams of blogs filled with non-objective opinions I think we'd really be sunk.
Maybe a few major newspapers could continue to pull in enough online ad revenue to fund the kinds of journalism they can now, but many small market papers could not. We would then be stuck with an ever-shrinking pool of objective reporters giving us our news, and an exponentially growing pool of acid tongued, uninformed opinion spewers. Not to mention the fact that online crossword puzzles just aren't the same...
It's called RSS. (Score:5, Insightful)
I skim approximately three mainstream news sources, a handful of blogs and a few independent news sites for RSS headlines that catch my attention. I spend the rest of my online time reading select forums that are mostly inhabited by people who present what I believe to be intelligent/interesting discourse (yes, believe it or not, that *does* include Slashdot from time to time).
Guess how much time I spend surfing random links and going page to page within a site using their fancy ajax navigation elements? I don't know what the percentage is, but pretty close to zero. 40 page article about Nvidia's latest Geforce gizmo? Skip to conclusion, then go to three of their competitors' sites to see if they concur. There's just too much damn noise and information out there to do it any other way. I use RSS, del.icio.us and a few simple techniques to reduce the web into my own personal CliffsNotes. If I'm representative of any significant segment of the population, then no wonder mainstream news sites are hurting.
A real tech magazine (Score:4, Informative)
The funny thing is that its founder Steve Ciarcia [wikipedia.org] left then market leader Byte Magazine, because it was turning into an advertorial marketing rag. Guess which magazine no longer exists :-)
Depends on where you are (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, I'd like to stress the importance of printed media. We still have a couple of good magazines and I'd hate to lose them because supposedly one print magazine can be replaced with a dozen mediocre websites. (PC Professionell, certainly one of the better ones, was recently discontinued while crap like Computerbild is doing fine.) It doesn't really matter whether the end product of good journalism is being published on dead wood or online, but good journalism costs money which you can't make online (yet). At least in some parts of the world.
Just like sushi (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, though, at what point will ABC/CBS/NBC start running prime time news headlines ripped from
How many reports/blogs have we seen in the past few years are wildly inaccurate, just wrong, or completely blown out of all proportion? Astroturfing, bought studies, fanboyism.
I'm guessing that the blogs are so popular:
1) People go to blogs where they get to read stuff that agrees with their own ideas/attitudes
2) People don't want to spend time to read anything substantive (ie, RTFA)
3) Ok, this one is good- narrow focus on a subject that you want to learn about
4) We shall totally refrain from the topic of political blogs.
5) Main stream media can be/will be/usually are behind in reporting things that have been mentioned on blogs. Supposedly, main stream media does fact checking, plus camera shots, background, live shots, etc. With a blog, you can pretty much just type anything you want with no reprecussions (with the usual caveats)
I know that mainstream media is abhorrent now, but at least (again, supposedly) they do some background into seek before splashing the "bad news" over anyones' walls.
Cheers
I hope that editors are here to stay (Score:3, Insightful)
Only tech news is so fragile that it can be conveyed by blogs. For other subjects (international analysis, arts, music, politic), most subjects treated are not really news. It might be for some readers but it's not the point. The editorial policies are what makes the content worth reading. Automatic RSS aggregators poorly replaces editors.
Personally, I find that even if I can customize to a point the content I get from the net, I got the huge problem of being spectator of what already interests me. I still have the curiosity to look out for new things that could interest me. My bookmarks or my subscribed feeds do a poor job for bringing me new sites (have you noticed how many blogs never change their subject and then die out of exhaustion ?).
Until there is a GoogleBot ready for handling the way I discover relevant intellectual information, I will need some human piece of advice. That's why journalists always were for I think. That's why they would stay. That started without an audience, I don't think audience is that relevant for journalism.
I read some comment saying that "paper press is dead". It's not. At least I seriously hope so. The ad-driven papers are suffering, I hope they will suffer more and more. Ad-free media has a price, pay for it if you can! Don't you think that ad-driven news will abuse you again, and again, and again, and again ... until the last drop of ink on earth will have been spent on attempting to make you buy something you didn't even think about before; on feeding you altered news; on conveying lies in the sole purpose of the interest of something or someone or some people that is not you, nor your family, nor your friends or anyone else for that matter ?
Barely a surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
Magazines go through cycles. When something new comes out or is changing in popularity, magazines flourish as people try to learn as much as possible about a subject. Then once things get to a point where said item is either so easy to use, you don't need help or becomes so mainstream people just accept the state of the art as is and don't bother investigating further.
The result is sales fall, ad revenue falls and the market consolidates and we're seeing that now in the IT press.
Previous victims include HiFi magazines - huge in the 70's and 80's when you could read all about fine tuning turntables, building concrete speaker stands and all that good stuff. Then CD and reasonably OK stuff for cheap came out and suddenly only real HiFi nuts cared - for most people an all-in-one set up was good enough. In the UK HiFi magazines went from a dozen and a half titles to 2 or 3 thin efforts.
Further back, we were awash with Microwave magazines, freezer magazines and so on. Once people became confortable with the products, they stopped buying them.
Most editors I've worked with since about 2000 reckoned IT mags in print were dead or about to be and it's surpring they've lasted as long as they have. You want reviews? Why wait a month - get it online the day it comes out. Help? Tutorials? it's all here for free on the web. The only real difference is the quality. Some websites go in to far more detail on a product than a magazine would ever bother but equally, general editorial tends to be better in a magazine where an editor has tidied up bad prose or woolly thinking.
Maybe if they weren't all crap... (Score:4, Interesting)
When is the last time you picked up ANYTHING from Ziff Davis and wanted to read it? Most of these magazines are filled with either articles that don't tell the whole story, gussied up press releases, six month old tips for the novice, editorials that are just written by FUD spewing morons selling their page to the highest bidder (I'm looking right at you, Mr. Dvorak), or news I read about three weeks ago on Slashdot (four weeks ago from other sources).
Why the hell do I want to cut down some trees and PAY for that?
I actually used to have a job for a PR firm that worked exclusively for tech companies. One of my duties was to scan these rags for articles about clients, or about their field of business. In that year, I skimmed pretty much every tech publication that was worth mentioning: PC Week, PC Magazine, Computerworld, Byte, Wired, Red Herring, Dr. Dobb's Journal, PC World, CRM, etc. Not a single one can keep up in print, with the pace of the tech sector today. They barely could 10 years ago when the web was new. Now, they are relegated to informing people that only have a passing interest in technology, because all the people that are actively engaged already know.
I can't imagine why the advertisers are leaving.