Canadian Business Magazine notices Blogs, hails them as revolutionary

Canadian Business Online

Blogs get started by bloggers writing about the things the bloggers have seen in the news media. The news media then notices the blogs, and starts reporting on the blog "trend," which is analogous to brontosauruses saying to each other "Have you noticed all these small, warm, furry creatures scuttling around in the undergrowth? How cute! Of course, we're so much bigger and better than they are." The New York Times even has a page in the Sunday edition that reports on what's new in the "blogosphere." Many media-watching bloggers find this endlessly amusing.

Back on to my topic, Canadian Business' Alex Mlynek faithfully reports on the emergence of blogs as not only an outlet for John Q Public to hold forth on their obsessions field of study, but as viable revenue generating businesses, and upstart challengers to the mainstream media from which the public can recieve their daily fix of factoids.

Out of necessity, articles like Mlynek's need to be written from the perspective that the reader is a martian (or perhaps a network or newspaper executive) who doesn't know anything, and needs to be educated from scratch. Thus, you end up with bytes that come across as delightfully wide eyed and naïf:

This one-woman operation's monthly figures don't yet come
close to the huge paid circulation numbers that help mags such as Us Weekly and
People generate hundreds of millions in advertising revenue each year. Still,
you can't help but notice these kinds of scoops, plus the ad revenue their
purveyors are starting to attract--and see how gossip sites are biting at the
heels of the big players.

Wow, you can make money on the Internet? Why wasn't I told about this before?

Of course, my favorite takewaway from the article is this:

Another distinctive feature is the bloggers' snarky and
humorous tone. A recent Defamer.com post about actor Brandon Routh's engagement,
for instance, is headlined "Some guy who played Superman engaged to girl you've
never heard of." What marks the good blogs from the bad is a unique, no-bullshit
take.

(Note to self: more snark, more "no-bullshit," and research other blogs for "unique" aspects I can copy incorporate)

This attitude amongst the "new journalists" in the "new media" isn't restricted to the celebrity gossip blogs that Mlynek focuses on. Most of the primary sources in my daily news matrix are blogs: Dealbreaker for business and financial news, and CE Pro for news relating to my industry (readers might recall that I scooped CE Pro back in August on the Klipsch/API deal), amongst many others. Inevitably the common thread amongst all the sources in my matrix is a "call it as they see it" attitude, and a small dose of snark (or in Dealbreaker's case, a horse-tranquilizer sized dose of snark).

One byte that I took exception to, from a hollywood publicist who should know better was this:

Rosenfield also worries, if a blog posts incorrect
information, it's hard to get a correction. "If a paper prints something that is
wrong...I say, 'You printed this, and this is not accurate.' [With blogs], you
can't find half of them," he explains.

Obviously, Rosenfield doesn’t spend a large amount of time perfecting search terms on Google. Even just typing "George Clooney+blog" would probably do it. Give me five minutes with Google, and I can find anything, including the email address for Ms. Mlynek that I dug up just so I could tell her how much I appreciated her article.

Naturally, me blogging about a magazine article that was written about blogs is exactly the kind of meta-media that we like to see around here. Here at businessopinions.blogspot.com I will continue to expand boundaries, inculcate paradigms and tread new ground for your reading pleasure.

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