Felix Salmon

Jerry Abejo has revisited the idea of blog aquisitions, and doesn’t really seem to get it. He’s not only way off the mark factually (Gawker Media gets over 200 million pageviews a month, not 30 million), but he also seems to give far too much weight to people who for whatever reason don’t want to buy blogs. Surely the relevant universe, however, is the smaller number of people who are willing to bid against each other to buy blogs – and Abejo doesn’t seem to have talked to any of those.

Instead, he quotes Seth Alpert of AdMedia Partners, as well as one Russell Crafton, making very weak arguments indeed:

Alpert argues that blogs, in particular blog networks, may have trouble generating reader loyalty, a factor that may give pause to advertisers.

“It doesn’t truly own the audience,” Alpert says. “There’s not a lot of proof that you could generate substantial advertising revenue through a blog network. Most of those companies are fairly small.”

Although blogs like The Huffington Post operate as small newsrooms with a staff of rotating writers, many are tied to a singular voice and talent. This underscores the other most common argument against blog investments, that many of these sites are too closely tied to their authors.

“You’d have to see blogging sites offer more of a broader, online magazine approach, if you will,” says Russell Crafton, a partner at boutique bank Redwood Capital, discussing an approach that might comfort possible investors. “Something like daily postings, news, thoughts, ideas, can get tons of traffic, but it’s not really a sustainable business model beyond that individual,” he adds. “There’s a limited amount of time that people spend on a site like that.”

The first part of Alpert’s argument doesn’t even make sense. Reader loyalty, owning the audience – blogs do that really well, thanks partly to the way that readers are forced to return regularly in order to participate in comments streams.

The second part might be more germane. Blogs are very small fish in the world of big media companies, and even a big blog network might well have difficulty moving the needle, to use the jargon. Then again, Gawker Media has more pageviews than all but the very largest US newspapers: 200 million pageviews a month is nothing to sneeze at, even if you’re the New York Times. And Gawker Media today gets more visitors – and more valuable visitors – than About.com had when the NYT bought it for $410 million in 2005.

As for Crafton, he seems to be saying that a website with "tons of traffic" isn’t going to be worth much unless and until it can increase the amount of time that the average reader spends on it. To which I say: tell that to Google. Blogs generally work on the principle that the more you send people away the more they come back, which is something the likes of Russell Crafton seem to have enormous difficulty understanding. To this day, I have yet to find a single major media company which has non-advertising external links on its flagship homepage. But that will, inevitably, change. And when it does, newspaper and magazine websites are going to find it much easier to acquire those bloggy skills than to try to grow them in-house.

(HT: The very flattering Barry Graubart.)

I’m enjoying this conversation with Dean Rotbart far too much to stop now, even though I suspect it’s of interest only to a handful of my readers. But I’m a blogger! So on I go; you’re more than welcome to stop reading now if you have no more interest in this journalists vs bloggers story.

But anyway, a couple of datapoints for you. Firstly, the Washington Post has decided to syndicate stories from TechCrunch. Those stories might well include blog entries by Erick Schonfeld, who was guilty of propagating unconfirmed rumors yesterday. And Erick Schonfeld, it turns out, was on Dean Rotbart’s list of star journalists under the age of 30 in both 1996 and 1997. Rotbart might like to maintain the distinction between bloggers and journalists, but it’s clearly disappearing in front of his very eyes.

Yet he is fighting his corner valiantly, even unto using words like "vomit" to describe what it is that a blogger does. Although I do have to wonder: since Dean is writing on his blog, does that make him, too, a vomiter of views?

I also fear that Rotbart simply hasn’t been reading the blogs he so happily slanders as "gossip, rumor and snark". Yes, some blogs traffic in such things – but many don’t. How much gossip, rumor and snark is one likely to find at Econbrowser or Alpha Sources? Rotbart is right that the world of finance writing "has needed a livelier delivery for a long time" – doesn’t he think that’s exactly what’s being provided by Steve Waldman, Andrew Clavell, TED, Baruch, and many others? Where in the financial press is the yield curve watched with greater avidity than at Across the Curve? Where is the housing crunch covered in greater or more intelligent detail than at Calculated Risk? Where can world-class economists like Brad DeLong and Dani Rodrik engage in public uncensored debate about current events without having to fight their way through thickets of commissioning editors worried about whether everything they write will be comprehensible to all the readers of the publication in question?

Yet that’s not how Rotbart is thinking:

Some of what I read, in fact much of what I read, is all snark and no substance.

If the blogosphere is a medium, a conversation and a babble, over time it has to be a number of additional things: pertinent, informative, factual (sorry, Felix) and accountable (double sorry, Felix).

You can go to a dinner party and be amused by the slightly inebriated guest who speaks of his financial and sexual conquests. He is certainly more lively than the staid insurance salesman. But after a steady diet month in and month out of hearing about the lush’s financial and sexual adventures, I think most people will grow wary. Especially when the boaster shows up night after night in shabby, worn clothes and no date.

There are far more examples in the old dead-tree world of journalism of financially successful credible news organizations than their are of gossip rags such as the National Enquirer. There is a reason for this. The marketplace votes with its wallet and its feet. Over time, serious, well-researched, accountable writing (dare I say ‘journalism’) has won out repeatedly over gossip, rumor and snark.

What makes Rotbart think that there’s more "substance" in journalism than there is in the econoblogosphere? After all, as I explained on his panel, financial journalists are generally pretty unqualified to understand what they’re writing about, while financial bloggers often do it for a living.

But the problem is that none of the blogs I just mentioned are "accountable" enough for Rotbart. I’m not entirely sure what he means by this, but judging by what he said on the panel, he means that if he doesn’t like what I write, he can complain to my editor, rather than being forced to complain to me directly.

What Rotbart wants, it seems, is to bring the whole editorial org chart crashing down onto the blogosphere – something which neither should nor could ever happen. Does he really think that econoblogs aren’t pertinent, informative, or factual? Which ones is he reading? And why does he think that he’s in any way qualified to "help nurture those quality blogs and bloggers"?

Journalists love receiving one of Rotbart’s "30 under 30" awards because it makes them much more employable, and it looks great on their resumes. But bloggers have their own source of recognition: inbound links. I’m sure I’d be flattered to get an award from a grand-sounding organization run by Rotbart. But I’m much more flattered, every day, when people I hugely respect and admire link to things I’ve written and accept me as a member of their community. What Dean Robart plus $2,500 could do one day a year, Mark Thoma does every day of the year when he links to the best writing around the blogosphere. We have our judges, and they are us.

Dean Rotbart is full of bright ideas. Here’s the latest, in a comment on this blog:

Let’s establish a non-profit, volunteer board of people to recommend standards for financial bloggers, dealing with issues such as conflicts-of-interest, disclosure, and accountability.

Second, let’s establish a annual awards recognition for econobloggers who bring honor to their craft… I will pledge the first $2,500 toward this awards program and agree to help raise another $30K (from non-PR, non-corporate folks) to make the program viable. Any takers?

Not me.

I’m going to bash this horse just a little bit further, because I have a feeling that if Dean doesn’t get it – and Dean’s a bright guy – then a lot of other people don’t get it either. Blogging is not a craft which is honored by the good bloggers and sullied by the bad. It’s a medium, a conversation, a babble. Its very variety is its strength.

I emailed Dean yesterday:

Your main argument seems to be that journalists are better at being journalists than bloggers are. And you’re right about that. But that’s not what blogs are for, and it’s not what we claim to do. It’s a bit like complaining about your hairdresser who gave you a little scalp massage after washing your hair, on the grounds that you can get a much better scalp massage from a qualified masseur.

Any board of Dean’s is likely to honor the most journalist-like bloggers: the ones with disclosure and accountability, the ones without gossip and rumor and snark. There might well be some bloggers out there who aspire to "bring honor to their craft", but I’m sure they’re in a minority. And there might be some readers out there who are scared of the wild wild blogosphere, and who would love Dean Rotbart to hold their hand and tell them which blogs are kosher (not to mention the blogs which don’t mix their metaphors). But the broad mass of blog readers would have no interest in this kind of thing, and the broad mass of blog writers would be interested mainly in the money.

What I love most about the blogosphere is, frankly, the anonymous bloggers – people who are in the industry, generally, and therefore can’t reveal their identities, but who know what they’re talking about and are often very funny to boot. The world would be a poorer place without The Epicurean Dealmaker or Tanta or Abnormal Returns or any number of other anonymous econoblogs, but pretty much by definition they don’t have the "accountability" which Dean seems to consider so vitally important.

What blogs would he give awards to? I know that Dean admires Mark Thoma’s excellent Economist’s View blog, but even that might fall short of Dean’s standards, since Mark has a habit of quoting at slightly greater length than some people might consider fair use. If Dean wants full disclosure etc etc he’ll find himself gravitating towards blogs on big media sites like the FT or the WSJ or even Portfolio, which would be really boring and largely defeat the purpose, since the very vibrancy of blogging comes from the fact that it’s mostly not done by journalists.

The fact is, as I said on the econobloggers panel with Dean, that blogs tend to get the readers they deserve. Dean is worried, essentially, that naive readers will stumble across a blog and treat it uncritically, as they would a newspaper. But in practice that doesn’t happen: the people who enjoy clicking around the blogosphere tend to be people who read not only blogs but also newspapers very critically. And in many cases, of course, it’s the commenters who really make a blog great.

Four years ago, I posted a long and boring blog entry on the ethics of blogging. It was generally, and rightly, ignored. Bloggers can and should behave as they will. If you don’t like a particular blogger’s attitude or behavior, don’t read that blog. If you’re a blogger, and you’re sloppy and unreliable, you’ll probably not get much in the way of readers or links from other blogs. In that sense, blogs are self-policing. And they certainly don’t need Dean Rotbart or anybody else to tell them which of them are "bringing honor to their craft".