Everybody Wants to Be a Blogger

By Ian, on October 15th, 2006

On the IWantMedia site, there’s an interview with Josh Quittner, the editor of Business 2.0, who has just instructed all his journalists to start writing blogs in addition to their normal duties. The individual blogs will be aggregated on a super-site, in addition to the normal Business 2.0 blog. Quittner says that his team has accepted the extra work enthusiastically:

Yes, everybody wants to be a blogger. Part of this enthusiasm comes from a cover story we did [in September] called “Blogging for Dollars.” We showed how a lot of smart people are actually figuring out how to create these one– and two-man bands that are quite lucrative.

It won’t be quite so lucrative for Time inc. staffers, who will be paid ‘a modest CPM’. If it were me, what I’d be enthusiastic about would be the potential of following the path of their ex-colleague Om Malik who left the magazine to go solo with venture backing on June 12. Says Quittner: “We might end up creating some more Om Maliks, and that in itself would make this project worthwhile.”

Some interesting words, too, on the competing fortunes of digital and traditional media:

I think we’ll see a time when magazines will become the “class” play and digital media will become the “mass” play. On CNNMoney, my stories are seen by about 11 million people a month, which is way bigger than my magazine’s 600,000 circulation.
Over time, magazines will need to reinvest in the magazine-ness of the magazine. Magazines will have to be high-touch, high-impact units. And they’ll probably enjoy much smaller rate bases. But I think we’re going to be able to charge more in the way of subscriptions for the print product because it attracts the people who are the die-hard readers.

I don’t actually agree that the divide will be between casual (online) and hardcore (print) readers. Enough specialisation exists between websites to ensure there’s plenty for even the most obscure enthusiasms. There’s a division along the lines of age, of course, but that is reducing all the time. I think the real division is more about the purposes for and context in which we read each format. When I read print now, it is either because I am reading for enjoyment (Sunday newspapers, music magazines, books) or because what I am reading is not available online (books again). I’m getting magazines so I can read them in an armchair, in bed, in the bath or on a train or plane journey. If I am reading for fast information and opinion, I’ll go online.