Paid professional staff displaced amateur bloggers in the attention economy

Evidence

As if tabloid journalism weren’t challenge enough, the amateur bloggers also now faced professional competition of several kinds. A British journalist living in New York named Nick Denton launched a carefully curated blog named Gizmodo, covering gadgets and technology, and another named Gawker, co-launched with Elizabeth Spiers, which disseminated media gossip (Wonkette was also part of what would become the Gawker group). The political blogs also professionalized: the Daily Kos, a one-man left-leaning Talking Points Memo, hired staff to run more ambitious coverage. Major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, assigned experienced journalists to blog full-time, leveraging all of the authority and prestige of the old media to go after the new audience. Whatever power lay in what Yochai Benkler had called the “wealth of networks,” the old media’s trick of paying people still had some power as well. More work for the journalists, perhaps, but it did stem the flow of attention away from legacy media. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 969

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapters on how legacy media absorbed and neutralized new competitors — the old-media counterstrike on blogs mirrors earlier patterns. — connects to: Anonymous heterodox blogs outpaced named economists in post-crisis insight — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 2033; The web enabled mass amateurization of creative work formerly reserved for professionals — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 905; Amateur web creators faced burnout because content production needs paid labor — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 922 (+5 more)