Marketwatch's David Weidner says that many of the existing Wall Street blogs leave much to be desired:

Put your fingers in your eyes because here comes more yabber.

Wall Street blogs are sprouting up everywhere. Some are good. Some are funny. Some are boring and some, by comparison, make the stock tables in the back of the newspaper read like poetry.

When someone creates editing software that keeps bloggers from spewing what you wouldn't bother telling your dog, that, folks, is going to be a revolution.

He reserves judgement about Dealbreaker, because it hasn't launched yet, but is optimistic:

Spiers' track record suggest Dealbreaker will become the top site for Wall Street gossip in short order. Not that there's stiff competition out there.

Pixel-Stained Wretches: Wall Street Blogs Have Their Moments, But Few [Marketwatch]

(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]

Slate's Daniel Gross declares blog-based businesses over before they started in this article:

As a cultural phenomenon, blogs are in their gangly adolescence. Every day, thousands of people around the world launch their blogs on LiveJournal or the Iranian equivalent. But as businesses, blogs may have peaked.

It goes without saying that if I thought Gross was right, I wouldn't be starting Dealbreaker, but I don't think he makes much of a case here. (And I normally like his writing.)

First, he's woefully short on evidence/actual data. If there were thousands of commercial blog networks in existence, he'd be in a position to reasonably handicap, but at the moment there are only a handful of major players (Gawker, Weblogs Inc, etc) and single digit sample sizes don't have much credibility. If there is a "blog business" sector large enough to qualify it as an industry, or a sub-industry, or a micro-industry, it's miniscule. (Raise your hand if you make a living blogging. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?) There are not actually very many people doing this *as a business.*

Secondly: Interpreting Bob Pittman's desire to get out of Daily Candy as "smart money leaving the blog business" presumes that (A) Bob Pittman is smart money (I know people who would disagree with that) (B) Daily Candy is a blog (it isn't) and (C) Pittman wants out because he thinks the business is unattractive; not because Daily Candy has been around for years and is, as these things go, a fairly mature business, and ready for an exit.

So what else has he got? Media overexposure. If you've read about it thirty times in the New York Times Styles Sections, it's obviously over. If he wants to argue that blogs are culturally over, then that might be an indicator. But I don't see online ad rates going down because of it or any bottom line indications that it's a shitty or dying business model. Sure, hype precedes bubble, but I don't think you're going to see Gawker Media imploding anytime soon, anymore than dot com hype wiped out the Internet when the bubble burst.

What I think *will* happen, and it's already happening, is that VCs, many of whom have been sitting on massive overhangs, cleaning up portfolios and still recovering from the last tech boom's hangovers are going to throw money at blog-related technologies. And most of it will be dumb money and most of those companies won't be necessary. And there will be an inevitable reckoning of sorts.

But blog companies like Gawker and Weblogs Inc are fundamentally *media* companies. They're editorially driven, not technology driven. And if voice-y online editorial content supported by advertising doesn't work as a business, Gross might want to quit his job at Slate right now.