(I think I understand how Nick determines his press policies, but I've never actually been able to find the incriminating Magic 8 Ball.)
Clive Thompson takes a look at commercial blogging for New York mag today, and there's a bit about Dealbreaker:
Will professionalization turn blogging into media-as-usual? Or will the idiosyncratic voice of the lone blogger prevail? Elizabeth Spiers thinks that both statements are true. After she left Gawker, she learned about the power of the first-mover advantage the hard way, by trying to repeat her success. Last year, she spent three months launching eight media-gossip sites for Mediabistro, a career-development site for journalists. They amassed an impressive 1 million page views a month, a healthy amount, but hardly Gawker-class. Then in January, Spiers jumped back into the blog pool with a splash, announcing that she was launching her own blog empire.When I call her, she is at her desk in her new company’s offices in Tribeca. She’s being backed by two angel investors—Carter Burden, head of the Webhosting company Logicworks, and Justin Smith, president of The Week, a news magazine. Their first blog, launching in March, will be called Dealbreaker, and devoted to Wall Street gossip. Her advertisers would be? “For Wall Street? Pretty much everybody,” she says. “It’s a high-income demographic, pretty attractive.” The start-up money lets her pay for a full-time blogging staff, which she’ll need since she wants her writers to actually do reporting and break news. And this, she argues, is the future of the professional blogosphere.
“It’ll be more like the mainstream media, really,” she adds. “Blogging is increasingly becoming a survival of the fittest—and that all boils down to who has the best content. The blogs that are going to stand out are the ones who break news and have credibility.” Plus, it can’t hurt that Wall Street scuttlebutt is one of the last truly huge unfilled niches in the Manhattan blogosphere. “This is a business, and we’ll build business infrastructure from the get-go.” The age of the blog moguls is here.
I thought the piece was pretty balanced. It was half expecting a rah-rah-everyone's-getting-rich-off-of-blogs article and it didn't go there. And I think it correctly pointed out that making a living from a blog is usually more complicated and difficult than launching a blog and sticking Google AdSense on the page.
That said, I'm surprised there aren't more people in this space, given the economics. Starting a commercial blog is certainly more cost-effective than starting a print magazine or doing a TV pilot, and if the concept fails, your losses are--at the very worst--about what most media companies pay marketing firms for a round of focus grouping.
Along those lines, I think Time Warner's new site, OfficePirates.com, is a good idea and pretty much the only way a new launch is going to compete economically in the already-crowded US laddie mag market. Given that it's Time Warner, the editors probably have to get board-level approval for font changes, but if they aren't completely mummified in bureaucratic duct tape, I think it could be good.
The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom [New York Mag]
Posted by Elizabeth Spiers at February 13, 2006 03:26 PM