If you hang around in the NYC media bubble long enough, you develop the social depression of a collapsing industry. The west coast is full of a giddy frisson about the inevitable demise of big media, while the midwest is skeptical of everything that gets force-fed to them from the coasts. NYC, which has essentially zero awareness of any of this, continues to constantly be shocked! when a TMZ or Pitchfork or The Onion comes along from the hinterlands with a massively successful enterprise.
The reasons for this amounts to a lack of vision. Even smart people, vampiracly [sic] bound to the past, seem completely blind to developing new formats. The standard for online innovation right now is ‘launch another blog,’ which no one seems to recognize is about as depressing as launching another newspaper.
OH SNAP INSIDE DOT COM REFERENCE!
Rexy (via caro) (via mikehudack)
Since Rex moved here, I’ve heard him make endless pronouncements about New York. Some of them are dead-on and some of them are inaccurate, but the latter are mostly a function of Rex having lived here only a little over a year. And this graf is (sorry, Rex) indicative of the latter.
I’m not an expert on NY media by any means, but I was here, and no one in New York was shocked (shocked!) by the appearance of TMZ or Pitchfork or the Onion. TMZ was funded by New York (TWX is based here), the Onion moved here (because they thought it was necessary) and suggesting that NY media isn’t interested in Pitchfork (because most music pubs here cover mainstream music) is not a proxy for suggesting that it was surprised by Pitchfork’s arrival.
And people don’t launch blogs because they think they’re innovative. They launch blogs because the blogging format (and it’s a FORMAT, not a medium, and not a descriptor of editorial content) is the most conducive to high volumes of content at the cheapest price point. It’s popular because it’s economically and operationally efficient, not because anyone thinks they’re single-handedly shifting any paradigms with their amazing command of WordPress.
But it’s ironic that mediaite is being held up as a contradiction to all of that. Because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that ranking system before. And blog software publishing into grid layouts, and so on. So where are the new ideas, exactly?
(via spiers)
