I had meant to continue yesterday’s blog about a report from Harvard suggesting that online newspaper growth is slowing. But then I read a comment by Mark Hamilton that pointed me to a perfectly good analysis of that very same report written by Alan (Newsosaur) Mutter.
I’ll excerpt from that posting later, but first the laughter.
In rooting around Mutter’s site I came on a prior entry in which he reveals how a mention from “Catherine McMillan, an airbrush artist and schnauzer breeder“who maintains a blog called Small Dead Animals gave him a much bigger traffic boost than mentions on name-brand, mainstream media. He suggested that mass media, aka Large Dead Animals or Large Ones, for short – are too conventional for the wild and wacky web:
“With the formidable creative talent, market reach, commercial relationships and financial capability they possess, the Large Ones ought to have an enormous edge over Canadian schnauzer breeders in creating editorially compelling and commercially successful online content. But they are failing, because they try to confine their new media ventures to the tightly edited and carefully modulated conventions of their existing brands.”
As an ill-tempered reporter for a middling metropolitan daily all I can say thus far is: What he said!
I reached Mutter’s Dead Animals rant after reading his “Flat-lining online” post on the Harvard study. It’s a good analysis that drew a comment from media executive and blogger Howard Owens who was dismissive of the study:
“I have direct access to audience metrics for several small newspaper sites, and I talk enough with other site managers and small- and mid-sized to know that the Harvard report is bunk.”
I have no way to assess the overall health of online news traffic or settle the argument, but I have previously cited the work of Thomas Patterson, the Harvard prof who wrote this report. Patterson is working on the issue of civic engagement which should make his work interesting to everyone in this age of interactivity,
Speaking of which, I visited the blog of Mutter’s new friend, Our Lady of Dead Animals, who he says creates “editorially compelling” content and has a “commercially successful” site.
Really? Small Dead Animals is full of vitality and reader interaction and won best Canadian blog in 2006 (and I think in 2004). But the author is not so much creating content as she is linking to it and provoking discussions. Her audience sends in stuff to discuss. This sounds familiar. Wait, wait, it’s talk radio with your fingers! I’m not demeaning this blog, its author or the engagement of its community. There were better than 30 comments on the postings I scanned. What I wouldn’t give for that kind of engagement from readers, either here or at my day job!
But I saw no sign whatsover of commercial success. She solicits donations and sells her airbrush paintings on the site. For all we know she takes in-kind donations of road kill in partial payment.
I definitely feel my bargaining power as a professional writer is declining and I suspect that in the sales offices where my salary is ultimately paid they’re discounting off the rate sheet to keep advertisers in the paper.
But I really think that as a professional content creator I should draw the line at accepting any compensation package that includes dead animals that been neither skinned nor shrink-wrapped.
5 users commented in " I laughed til it hurt; some of it was so true "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThe blog wasn’t created with commercial success in mind. I didn’t even run ads the first year or so, and only added the donation button last November.
Nor do I sell my “airbrush paintings” on my site. I don’t create airbrush paintings, for that matter. I do automotive airbrushing - race cars, motorcycles. My profession exists quite nicely without the help of the blog. (Nice fact-checking, that).
That said, the monthly return on “investment dollar” at SDA currently runs at around 30 - 1.
Your talk radio observation is right on, though. And there is editorial commentary from me from time to time, but the blog follows the “cyber sherpa” model primarily, directing readers to items that expand upon, or rebut the major news items or political issues of the day.
SDA is a hobby - the fact that it’s drawn over 6 million visits in 3 years, and some of the most loyal regular readers in the blogosphere (including many leaders in Canadian media) is what underlies SDA’s ability to push traffic.
Why? My readers trust me. They may not always agree with my point of view, but they read what I link to. How many in mainstream media can say that?
Kate, how great to have you visit and leave such fine and useful words. The point you make about trust is crucial. You are a person. You have a voice and a center and, in a comforting way, perhaps, a predictibility. Those traits help create what I think of as habit and you call trust. It is so much harder to do that inside a corporate media structure such as my day job because the “voice” must be a filtered or homogenized. That is the standard of quality or brand that has been mass media’s hallmark. As someone on the inside of mass media by day I think the happy medium is to let paid newsies develop blogs that would be more the quick-fire ethos of the blogosphere, and which would allow beat reporters to develop conversations among the people who care on any given issue. More depth and passion, in other words, in online news. And then the print editors could read through their own blogs, skim the best stuff, look for patterns, generally use those reporter-generated blogs as a central nervous system down into the communities they cover. That could be a system to develop the trust which you earn by virtue of your humanity inside an industrial news-gathering system that desperately needs to plug back into everyday concerns. Luck to both of us, eh!
In follow-up, I’d like to point you to something I just posted on - observations about the Minneapolis bridge collapse that one of my readers made right after the event, followed by an AP report that only came out today. He used to clean bridges.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/006894.html
That is the secret behind the best blogs. They don’t just allow the readers to speak, they respect their knowledge. They keep the filters at the lowest possible setting.
I opened a comments thread a few months ago asking my readers to share their primary occupations. After the first 600 or so had done so, someone did a tally. About 10% were engineers.
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/006355.html
Remember that next time someone decides to characterize blog readers as unemployed basement-dwellers.
So, when a bridge collapses in Minnesota, who do you think has the best, and most rapid access to expertise. The Strib? Or a blog run by a commercial artist in Saskatchewan?
I never said Small Dead Animals was commercially successful, because I don’t have any way of knowing if it is. What I did say is that big media companies have the skills and relationships that ought to enable them to create compelling and commercially successful sites. With all due respect, it is not fair for you to extrapolate from those comments the idea that I said SDA is commercially successful.
Alan, I like this “with all due respect” lingo. It almost sounds like we’re in the Senate. However I believe the rules of grammar are completely on my side in that when you say ” the Large Ones ought to have an enormous edge over Canadian schnauzer breeders” what follows . . . your comments about compelling content and commercial success . . . have no other possible antecedents in the story. With that I yield back balance of my time to any Enlish teachers or grammarians or rhetoricists because this is a disagreement over meaning rather than media.
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