NYT Baits Bloggers

Michael Hedges May 23, 2005

By September access to opinion columnists on the New York Times web-site will come with a charge. This newspaper has decided that there’s money in weblogs.

It ain’t a strategic move, or not one with legs. Baiting America’s 10 million bloggers with a surcharge is an idea that could only have originated in the accounting department. If 5% sign-up, the NYT could pay a couple of salaries. (Note to Tom Friedman’s agent: Ask about revenue sharing!)

The Pew Internet & American Life Project issued its preliminary report – Buzz, Blogs and Beyond – May 16th. In a footnote, the report identifies three blog types: the “filter blog,” the “personal journal” and “k-logs.” Blogs, the authors summarize, are not buzz-leaders, but buzz-followers.

The “filter blog,” borrowing the reports definition, “supplies interesting content found elsewhere online to readers.”  Much of that “interesting content” comes from newspapers, but not from detailed news stories. These bloggers love quoting and linking to opinion columnists, either to excoriate or praise, in pursuit of their narrative of choice. Optimum value for filter bloggers is the legitimacy granted from a comment cut from mainstream media commentators. The NYT is hoping that NYT columnists will continue to provide bloggers with rich (as in Frank Rich) fodder, now for a fee.

The idea of “filter” has haunted journalists and publishers for a decade or more, since cable TV exploded with “500 channels and nothing on TV” and, then, the Internet.  People, media researchers have discovered, have no patience for “the” news; they want “my” news. From the post-modernists in the crowd, that means folks want media to tell them the story they want to hear, and nothing else.

Europe has been slow to fall for blogs. Numbers are in the thousands, according the BlogShares dot com; not the millions. The “personal journal” blogs, noted in the Pew study, ride across the grain of Europeans uncomfortable sharing every little narcissistic detail of their tiny lives. Add to that the European journalistic tradition of starting with a point of view then accumulating supporting facts, “filters” are well known and well accepted. Le Monde or the NZZ do a good job filtering for their devoted readers. Knowledge blogs, or “k-blogs,” are gaining popularity among European businesses and organizations, as they are in the US, for quickly spreading comments from the PR, sales or customer service departments.

But bloggers have become big business. Six Apart, a San Francisco company marketing easy to use blogger software, recently expanded by purchasing LiveJournal and Ublog, a French blog software company. Six Apart markets TypePad and Movable Type; software that facilitates quick blog set-up. Live Journal’s tools are widely used by “personal journal” bloggers, largely teens. According to LiveJournal’s on-line statistics on May 22, its has over 3.5 million users in the US and barely 250,000 in Europe, over half of that in the UK. Microsoft also entered the blog market with MSN Spaces, also targeting teens, extending its MS Messenger brand. Nokia recently teamed up with Six Apart to develop the Lifeblog application using the TypePad software. Nokia, by the way, is now the world’s largest manufacturer of digital cameras.

Advertising aggregators are also courting bloggers. Several ad networks, all American, push ads, often thematically linked to content, into blank boxes on blog sites. This has led to a new species of blogger, the professional. Weblogs, for them, are the natural extension of the vanity press, only better because it’s cheaper. And it looks cheaper. For professionals there are always professional services.

This variation on the subscription to web-site theme is part of the long-view debate among all content providers about how to make, or a least recover, some money from the Internet. No content provider wants to happen to them what happened to the music business. The NYT‘s move acknowledges that it’s not only possible, but likely.