grodscorp@grods.comMlog: mainstream media web log
 | Posted by Scott on Wednesday 6 June 2007, 2:00 pm Categories: Blogosphere, Corporate stupidity, The Age Tags: JamesFarmer, MainstreamMedia, mlogging, TheAge |
Fairfax’s pathetic blog experiment is starting to fall apart. Social website expert, James Farmer, has quit his position as blogger for The Age’s Citizen blog and launched a beautiful broadside against mlogging as he walks away:
I am utterly sick of blog comments.
Honestly, I’ve had enough.
Enough of the flaming, the trolling, the moderation, the spam, the ‘who’s-got-more’ syndrome, the inanity and the sheer stupidity behind allowing them on sites like theage.com.au.
They devalue our content, insult much of our readership, piss off our advertisers, waste massive amounts of our time and place us at an enormous legal risk.
They’re also perhaps the least web-savvy thing we, as a large media organisation, should be doing. They’re yesterday’s online communication forums, they’re twee.
[...]
And finally, let’s not forget that the media, on the whole, is mostly about money. We’re more-often-than-not businesses, we have families to feed and shareholders to keep happy.
Every blasted comment on theage.com.au is moderated which means that not only do commentators have to wait up to 12 hours (should they deign to post after 5PM) for their comment to be approved (which it may not be, without explanation, nice huh!), but should we aim to have a section, such as CiF, then that would cost us literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in moderation fees to do so.
And if we stuff up, and let through a defamatory comment, then that’s potentially hundreds of thousands in damages or legal costs.
Without, and this is the bit that really cracks me up, any actual revenue (besides a slightly increased number of page views / time on page) coming in from comments.
We’re complete fools.
Lovely stuff. If only The Age spent more money on (gasp!) journalists and less on setting up lame, me-too imitations of real blogs and yet another lifestyle insert produced wholly for advertisers, they might have a chance of keeping my subscription beyond June.
Wednesday 6 June 2007, 2:29 pm #silpheed
Screw you! I was going to do a post about that very rant this evening. Now I’ll have to actually think.
Wednesday 6 June 2007, 3:26 pm #Bridgit Gread
He’s got a point. So there’s only one way for The Age to go…
Wednesday 6 June 2007, 4:37 pm #Bruce
The experiment is over; blogging isn’t journalism.
If people want blogs, they should go to blogs, not Fairfax or News Ltd. Bloggers do blogs better and blogs aren’t good for media outlets.
While Farifax are at it, could they flush that “Sam” who does the sex in the city blog ripoff?
Bruce
PS. Incidentally, is Andrew Bolt a journalist in a foreign discourse, or a blogger out of his environment?
Wednesday 6 June 2007, 9:46 pm #Mikey
Check out this months Monthly on Print Journalism and the internet. The loss of quality journalism will continue to occur since internet papers don’t have the revenue streams of the print ones. They even floated the concept of the not for profit paper or, gasp, a charity funded one.