Earlier this week Sarah Lacy had–a story? post? column?–something on BusinessWeek’s website, where she writes:
…Increasingly there’s a sense that the blogosphere lost a lot on the way to getting big…Jason Calacanis, one of the first to make serious money off blogging (when he sold his Weblogs to AOL for a reported $30 million), recently announced his “retirement.” “Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it”…Robert Scoble, who made his name blogging, lamented that tech blogs had let readers down…
I, too, am asking some of these same questions. After seeing my own blog readership swell in a short time to about 40,000 per month, I have misgivings about seeing sarahlacy.com grow much more. Bigger audiences mean trolls and spammers and a general breakdown in community and the high-level conversation I find so rewarding…
The problem with Lacy’s thing is that she, along with Scoble and Calacanis are established. They have made plenty of money through blogging. They can lament the problems with blogging and deride their large audiences because it doesn’t matter to them. They don’t need the page views or the unique visitors, because they aren’t trying to establish themselves as professional bloggers or reporters.
Many people say it’s an exciting time to be a journalist, especially a young journalist because it’s easier than ever to start your own site or blog. But that’s not true. It’s just as hard as ever to be a young reporter. Maybe even harder than in the past because you have really gloomy people in the industry lamenting the death of journalism.
When someone like Lacy says she’d like to keep her blog free of ads, with fewer visitors, it’s like Radiohead giving away their record and people saying “the music industry is changed forever.” Radiohead gave away their record because they were Radiohead. They were a band with a monstrous following that was still going to get reguolar royalty checks from their ex-label as well as cash from well attended concerts. Try starting a band tomorrow and announcing to the world they can pay what ever they like for it. What do you think the answer will be?
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