Tag Archives: meta
“another VC recently told me his firm recently had passed on opportunities to invest in some new tech…”
“another VC recently told me his firm recently had passed on opportunities to invest in some new tech blogs that were proposing a business model he described as “hush money.” Potential investors were being offered “most favored nation” status for themselves and their portfolio companies if they put money into the site.
This is what now passes for “journalism” in Silicon Valley: hired guns and reformed click-whores who have found a way to grab some of the loot for themselves. This is perhaps not surprising. Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on.”
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This is what now passes for “journalism” in Silicon Valley: hired guns and reformed click-whores who have found a way to grab some of the loot for themselves. This is perhaps not surprising. Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on.”
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Zing.
Content Everywhere, But Not A Drop To Drink
[Replace tech with finance. Still applies]
Most of what is written about the tech world — both in blog form and old school media form — is bullshit. I won’t try to put some arbitrary label on it like 80%, but it’s a lot. There’s more bullshit than there is 100% pure, legitimate information.
The problem is systemic. Print circulation is dying and pageviews are all that matter in keeping advertisers happy. This means, whether writers like it or not, there’s an underlying drive for both sensationalism and more — more — more.
Sad. True.
Sad. True.
‘The popular social blogging site Tumblr is hiring writers and editors to cover the world of Tumblr’
So meta my head imploded:
Chris Mohney, a senior vice president for content at BlackBook Media, will be the site’s editor in chief. Jessica Bennett, a senior writer and editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, will be the executive editor and, she said, a kind of Tumblr correspondent.
“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” Ms. Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”
Their work — both documenting the Tumblr service and marketing it to users — will appear on the Web site’s staff blog and on a separate part of tumblr.com that has not been set up yet, a Tumblr spokeswoman said Wednesday.
Source: Blogging Site Tumblr Makes Itself the News – NY Times
As if more examples were needed that the lines between so-called “content creators” (curators?) and “platforms” are blurrier than ever.
‘The New York Times’ offices are a surprisingly inert environment’
So said GorkanaPR in a comment on Monday 5 Dec 2011 (emphasis mine):
The end of empires
The feature length documentary, Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times was aired as part of the consistently excellent Storyville series a fortnight ago, although for the purposes of the Beeb it has been renamed Deadline (it’s available on iPlayer until next weekend). It was filmed in the same fly-on-the-wall manner as The September Issue, a similarly conceived film about Vogue, but unfortunately it focuses less about the editorial direction of the publication, and more a look at the US equivalent of Media Guardian. This may in part be because The New York Times’ offices are a surprisingly inert environment (the editorial meetings are especially disappointing) and you have to constantly remind yourself that this is the pinnacle of the US media establishment and not some logistics office of a multinational on the outskirts of St Louis. By focusing on the media team it also allows the film to use a number of incidents throughout the year from WikiLeaks to the collapse of the Tribune group to analyse how the newspaper market has changed in the US. It also allows the gruff and laconic media columnist David Carr to take a starring role.
Relevant:
Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis – Clay Shirky
Because, why not. Or, introducing the Galavant Times
It is the ultimate presumption: people care about what you have to say.
It is a necessary if (insufficient) trait of journalists, bloggers, tweeters prolific; it motivates an army of “curators”, aggregators and newsletter-writers.
It may explain the existence of this.
Which, inter alia, prompted me to think about this. #OccupyNewspapers?
