Chris Navin

You know what they say about predictions and the future…

Jason Kottke from ‘The Blog Is Dead, Long Live The Blog:’

‘Sometime in the past few years, the blog died. In 2014, people will finally notice. Sure, blogs still exist, many of them are excellent, and they will go on existing and being excellent for many years to come. But the function of the blog, the nebulous informational task we all agreed the blog was fulfilling for the past decade, is increasingly being handled by a growing number of disparate media forms that are blog-like but also decidedly not blogs.’

Blogging is still a no to low-cost way to share ideas and reach an audience. Twitter, however, (water-cooler for many a journalist) and other platforms like Pinterest, Tumblr, and Instagram are fulfilling similar functions that made blogging such a great diving-board for many to make the leap from print.

What about virality? No news outlet (nor marketer, really) can afford to miss out on viral content and the latest buzz, but, as Felix Salmon notes in ‘The Veracity Of Viral,’ this can raise other questions:

‘The reasons that people share basically have nothing to do with whether or not the thing being shared is true. If your company was built from day one to produce stuff which people want to share, then that will always end up including certain things which aren’t true.’

Successful sites like Buzzfeed and Gawker have managed to harness the power of viral content and the latest buzz, drawing big traffic and ad revenue, but they haven’t always figured out exactly how to connect their model with other duties that, say, your local newspaper may have fulfilled: Actual reporting, reporters on the beat etc.

Not such a big deal, unless, of course, you’re tired of reading everyone gossiping about viral content and the latest buzz, and everyone offering their opinion on a blog by linking to other blogs (addition: a reader points out linking is fine, it’s actually many bigger outlets that troll the blogs then often don’t link back to the blogs).

This reminds me of discussions I’ve heard for years about Craigslist, EBay, and Amazon, which hover around a common theme: Build the platform, app, or service first, and draw people away from the classified ads, flea-markets, bookstores and bring them online. Go from there. There are niches and people to reach, but it can be hard out there for a blog.

As to journalism and the punditocracy, I’ll leave you with this quote found here, by Andrew Potter:

‘In a philosophical debate, what everyone involved is trying to get at is the truth. In contrast, what is at stake in the political realm is not truth but power, and power (unlike truth) is a “rival good”—one person or group can wield power only at the expense of another. This is why politics is inevitably adversarial. Political power is ultimately about deciding who shall govern, and part of governing is about choosing between competing interests’