Required reading material: The Rise of the Professional Blogger by Benjamin Carlson.
The lingering fantasy that blogging is the ultimate tool for elevating the voices of the unshowered masses to the national debate is becoming harder to sustain. The simple truth is that the vast majority of professional blogs are now owned by media corporations.1 Which, in our culture of rampant mergers and sprawling corporate ambition, shouldn’t really surprise anybody.
So, considering all the above, the Atlantic‘s Benjamin Carlson just wants to know: What happened to the little guy?2
[F]ar from leveling the playing field, blogs have simply built up challenging new pathways to success, ones that with their familiar requirements—impress the right gatekeepers, court a mentor, work one’s way up from the inside—mirror the old-media ways.
Which, Carlson figures, can only mean one thing: blogging is “on the cusp of maturity” and, like radio and TV before it, will soon be just another tool of the networks.
Still, I object to Carlson’s ‘yeah, but…‘ treatment of Nate Silver (statistical and political guru who founded fivethirtyeight.com). Specifically, Carlson dismisses the implications of Silver’s rise from relative obscurity because Silver had toiled away for years on The Daily Kos – the implication being that his latter success owed an awful lot to the extreme popularity of The Daily Kos. While Carlson’s certainly right about the site’s extreme popularity (as of right now, #14 on Technorati’s list), he’s wrong about its status as some sort of tastemaker.
Success on the Daily Kos is far from a given. After all, any idiot can make an account – after which he is free to whack his head against their keyboard ad inf. But it takes an especially canny and gifted poster to bubble to the top of such a crowded scene. Silver registered in 2007 and his gift for quantitative statistical analysis earned him a lot of fans – many of whom followed him to 538, which he founded a year after.
Saying that Silver used the Daily Kos to catapult himself to the stars is only slightly less ridiculous than claiming that a person could similarly catapult his or herself with Livejournal. It’s not the medium that did the catapulting. Nate Silver is not Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the 28-year-old who famously got a job at the New York Times earlier this year (I say ‘famously’ because he also happens to be the publisher’s son).3 Silver was certainly not marketed as some smash hit, the way a pop music single is before it even hits the radio.
It’s the content. Silver made – and continues to make – extremely compelling content. And because of this, it’s tough for me to lump him in with the Made Bloggers crowd. He wasn’t absorbed into anything. He broke away.
Let me be clear. For the most part, I do agree with Carlson. It’s unquestionably dismaying to see how professional blogging has been nearly absorbed into the old boy network of the media industry.
But I feel as though his thesis needs some tweaking. It should go something like this: for every Silver there are fifty Sulzbergers – and the Sulzbergers are winning.
- AOL, for instance, owns more that 25% of the 100 most popular blogs [↑]
- A: Right here! So let’s just get this out there – N61 is, like, totally amenable to the possibility of a corporate buyout. [↑]
- The standard practice of seriously questioning the motivation of a writer who was born into a family of writers applies here. [↑]