Blogs Are Eating Tech Media Alive 247
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."
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.
Good (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This won't decrease the amount of advertising (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.
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:They waste money on editors (Score:5, Insightful)
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QuantumG seems like a guy who is bitter he isn't in the same position.
ads, not articles (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This won't decrease the amount of advertising (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with this culture that a few good old biblical stoning parties wouldn't fix.
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.
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.
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.
Re:They waste money on editors (Score:2, Insightful)
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:Not blogs, but forums (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 need to register or log in.
And the forum admins generally do a good job keeping things relevant and on-topic, making it nthat much easier to find the answer I am looking for.