Trevor Butterworth

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Once upon a time, traditional newspaper companies feared the blogosphere would put them out of business. In retrospect, that was a hopeful outcome.

The concern that a type of written content would be undone by another lesser one didn’t came to pass, most blogs never coming close to profitable, It was the new platform itself that broke the promise the print business had always rested upon. Once the advertising process was quantified, the clicks counted, the dollars that disappeared could not be replaced online money. The dream could no longer be sold. The whole system was cratered by the technological shift, not a surfeit of snark. Still, some today think the New York Times might be spared the worst if it adapts Jon Stewart’s witty tone. That’s where we stand now.

From “Time for the Last Post,” Trevor Butterworth’s 2006 Financial Times piece about the threat of the weblog:

As syndicated radio host and law professor Hugh Hewitt wrote in the conservative Weekly Standard last August, “It is hard to overstate the speed with which the information reformation is advancing – or to overestimate its impact on politics and culture. The mainstream media is a hollowed-out shell of its former self when it comes to influence, and when advertisers figure out who is reading the blogs, the old media is going to see their advertising base drain away, and not slowly.”

We are witnessing “the dawn of a blogosphere dominant media”, announced Michael S. Malone, who has been described as “the Boswell of Silicon Valley”. “Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news and has created a whole new group of major media companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies.”

Even the ne plus ultra of American public intellectuals, Richard Posner, senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago, former chief judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, declared blogging to be “the latest and perhaps gravest challenge to the journalistic establishment” (although it is worth noting that Judge Posner decided to publish his meditation in The New York Times Book Review rather than on his own blog).

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave “new economy” a few years ago?

Shouldn’t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one – especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich?•

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