Mark Cuban: "A blog is a blog is a blog."
Friday March 14, 2008
Categories: Media
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is a hothead, but he didn't get to be an Internet billionaire by being stupid about media. Today on his blog, he explains his theory of why newspapers are stupid to have blogs -- or...
Filed Under: Mark Cuban, media blogs
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Nothing makes me angrier than when I pick up my daily newspaper and it gives me a paragraph or two of an opinion piece and then tells me to go to the internet to finish reading it.
Economically sensible. Culturally horrific.
Using the NYT may not be the wisest of examples.
You know, I think Cuban is right about that, but on the other side of the coin, people are not waiting for branding mavens to tell them who to go to for real time information (and discussion).
Good, experienced reporters who have gotten into the blog game are doing well, such as Andrew Revkin at the New York Times on climate and other "slow drip" environmental changes.
The real problem for newspapers is that young people simply aren't reading them, not that they're using the word "blogs" when they should be using some other superior branding phrase.
I think Cuban is missing what a lot of people in the media industry are missing, and that is that most people now who are heavily into reading blogs don't care about the brand name. For better or worse, the internet has democratized information so much that people aren't drawn by the prospect of getting verified information from real reporters. This is the same segment of the population who in large numbers aren't afraid to admit they get their news from Comedy Central.
The internet gives ordinary people the means to feel that they can decide for themselves what is newsworthy, whether they actually can or not (and I have a lot of doubts about that). It is kind of serving the same purpose as the Reformation which democratized religion and a lot of media are playing the role of the Catholic Church in not understanding the appeal of having control of the information oneself and the declining appeal of authority.
Of course, old-timer outlets like the NYT and CBS haven't done themselves any favors with some well-publicized scandals pertaining to their own handling of the news at a time they could ill-afford such publicity.
I'd agree, Peter. Any sense of squeamishness over the name "blog" seems to belong to those in the MSM who think that "blog" means "poorly-written half-baked opinions and commentary from people who aren't professional journalists."
But what the rest of us have figured out is that the opinions and commentary in mainstream media sources can also be poorly-written and half-baked; similarly, the opinions and commentary of amateurs is sometimes well-crafted and insightful. In point of fact, the MSM has known this for a long time, but they preferred to organize the offerings of those sort of opinion writers under the category "Op-Ed."
Newspapers can't compete with Internet, television and other sources for breaking-news reporting; and they no longer have a lock on opinion writing. If they really want to focus on the one thing they can do better than any other form of media, they should be focusing on feature writing, especially those in-depth pieces that go far beyond the bare-bones reporting possible to the other types of media. To use a current events example, we can get "the news" about the Spitzer situation from a variety of sources, but only a newspaper can do something the other sources might find difficult: offer an in-depth profile of Eliot and Silda Wall Spitzer, tracing their public lives and making connections between the various events of Spitzer's career and the timelines being revealed now about his possible criminal activities. Newspapers still do a very good job of this, and they have the speed advantage over magazines whose features take much longer to appear on newsstands.
One of the reasons I gave up regular reading of newspapers was because most of the content seemed to be rehashed wire stories I'd read online the previous day, along with commentary at least some of which had also appeared online before it was printed. But there are times when I'll buy a paper precisely because it promises a well-written feature about a topic I'm interested in, and even if that story is also available online I am, like many people, disinclined to read an extremely lengthy story, or one that appears serialized, in an online format.
The internet gives ordinary people the means to feel that they can decide for themselves what is newsworthy, whether they actually can or not...
Of course, since the 24 hour 'news' channels have done so well in choosing for us. Forgive me if I forgo such newsworthy coverage as the Spitzer motorcade winding through traffic.
I enjoyed and was impressed by the perceptive observations in the previous comments.
However, having said that, none of them gets me past one salient point:
Mark Cuban gives me hives. I swear, when he's on SportCenter I feel like I need an epi-pen.
I'll put it this: Cuban misses the point. Newspapers are caught up in a negative feedback loop: falling readership results in staff cuts and more caution which results in falling readership which results in less money for newspapering. In addition, newspapers (along with the other parts of the establishment press) have got caught up in seeing themselves as the arbiters of what is true and what isn't, without the (neccessary) willingness to stick with the truth, even if that is merely the truth as reporters and editors see it. (What you wind up with is a weak tea that won't be criticized by other members of the press as untrue, even when the actual facts suggest that pars of the narrative (or the whole narrative) are in fact, wildly wrong.)
Blogs contain content, they are not the content itself - they're a method of delivery. And blogs are (sometimes) delivering what newspapers (and cable news!) have ceased to deliver. Newspapers would have a problem whether they had blogs or not, regardless of what they called the delivery system. The problem *I* have seen with newspapers having blogs is that those blogs are often no better and usually worse than non-newspaper blogs (even with duly noted exceptions). You can't differentiate a product if your product is merely par (or worse than) competing products.
After all, the NYT attempted Cuban's method with TimeSelect and it bombed pretty badly. All it did was emphasize that the content wasn't as good as the available 'free' content.
Cuban's remarks remind of various software (and hardware) vendors over the years, who got into a leading position in the market by having a better product, then slacked off, got beaten by the competition, started losing market share, and then tried to fix the problem with new marketing schemes. (Or they tried to resell the same old stuff in multiple new forms of shiny packaging; see Netware.) Those schemes never ever worked.
To me, the media markets look like the marsupials in the early phases of dealing with being outcompeted by an invasive species: in really bad trouble and no clue as to how to fix it.
max
['Some species survived, many did not.']
poorly-written half-baked opinions and commentary from people who aren't professional journalists . . . but . . . but you say that like it's a BAD thing! ; ) Cuban is completely missing the point. People don't want an official seal of approval on their blog reading, nor do they want a brand to remind them that they are the objects of obtrusive and relentless marketing devices. Those who read blogs enjoy wallowing in the data stream and enjoying the illusion that it is unfiltered. It's the sediment in the bottom of the bottle that makes it tasty.
a lot of media are playing the role of the Catholic Church in not understanding the appeal of having control of the information oneself and the declining appeal of authority. Good point, Peter, and funny as well! Cuban's idea of officially-approved bloggery has all the reading appeal of church-approved tracts off the rack in the vestibule.
"It is kind of serving the same purpose as the Reformation which democratized religion and a lot of media are playing the role of the Catholic Church in not understanding the appeal of having control of the information oneself and the declining appeal of authority." Peter
People who want "democratized religion", "control of the information" and who have disdain for authority, generally are not members of the Catholic Church; they are liberal Protestants and liberal Jews who want to customize the information that informs their spirituality without worrying about authority. "Want birth control, abortion, same-sex unions? No problem; the information we dispense, unlike the papists, is malleable."
By taking an uncalled for shot at the RCC, Peter, you fatally diluted your message about Cuban. He is totally about himself and money, and damn the consequences.
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