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No gatekeepers — just a bunch of turnstiles
First of all, I want to make it clear that I’m not linking to Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 again just because he linked to me and mentioned my name right after using the term “great bloggers” — although I can’t deny that I was flattered :-). I think his latest post about new media “gatekeepers” raises some good questions, just as a similar piece by Justin Fox at CNNMoney does. Even though I ranted a bit in a previous post about Scott, I think he is on the right track, and I think it is a debate and a conversation worth having.
The question is, who replaces the newspaper or radio and TV — the old-media gatekeepers? In other words, who do we look to for advice on what is relevant? Scott asks:
Who decides what’s worthy of your attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?
He also mentions how the A-list of bloggers, such as Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel, seem to be a little like the Old Media gatekeepers, in that they (with the help of tech.memeorandum.com and other sites) help determine whose voice is heard and whose is not.
On that point, I would have to disagree with Scott yet again. I haven’t been blogging that long, and I haven’t been actively trying to get traffic or links — apart from linking to and commenting on posts that I find interesting — and yet I’ve appeared on tech.memeorandum.com many times. I think the barriers are lower than they might appear to Scott and others, such as Kent Newsome, who has also written about how difficult it is to start a blog and get past the new media gatekeepers.
As for Scott’s question about who decides what is worthy of attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, etc. — I would have to agree with someone who commented on Scott’s post and say simply: Yes. All of the above, and more. As Matt McAlister suggests on his blog, the relevance of the “gatekeeper” role is quickly fading. Aggregator? Yes. Filter? Yes. Gatekeeper? No. I tend to think Stowe Boyd is right — there are a blend of voices filtering and recommending, from individuals to institutions, and even machines.
Update:
For more thoughts from Scott and I, as well as my friend Stuart MacDonald, please see the comments below — and Kent Newsome also has a perspective on the whole thing that’s worth reading.
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You can call them gatekeepers or whatever, but at the end of the day, what I find fascinating is that even in this age of instant, individual publishing and what have you, the value of The Brand still shines through.
-- Stuart
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"gatekeeper" :-) I agree that we still need ways of filtering
things, of separating what's important and what isn't -- we probably
need that more than ever. But I think "brands," if you want to call
them that, are likely to be developed by relationships, however brief
or fleeting -- not by names on a masthead somewhere or corporate
relationships, or placement on a newstand or TV broadcast. There are
blog writers whose opinions I trust even though i know virtually
nothing about them except for what they've written -- that's a very
different kind of brand, I think.
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But it's more than that -- forgive me for saying so, but the counterarguments I've heard, including Mathew's (with all due respect), are completely illogical. Unless the system of online content has devolved into a state of complete entropy, there are gatekeepers by definition. It makes no sense to say that because it's possible for some bloggers to make it through the gate easier than you might think, that proves there are no gatekeepers.
Mathew, you may have made it through the gate, but what about the other 20 million blogs that Technorati has tracked? That's 20 MILLION. They're not all getting attention -- why? Gatekeepers. You may have made it onto tech.memeorandum, but 99.9% of blogs never will. That's a gatekeeper by definition.
I'm not suggesting that the nature of media gatekeeping isn't rapidly changing. My question is what end state are we heading for, and is it a good thing?
If we're going to be clear-minded about the evolution of new media, we need to call a spade a spade.
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It's not just libertarian sensibilities though, Scott. Part of it is
that I don't think the term "gatekeeper" is a very good description of
what we're talking about. I think "gatekeeper" applies much better to
something like a newspaper than it does to something like technorati.
Filter is a much better word -- and that filter isn't driven by any
single person or even a group of people acting together, which is an
important distinction.
Gatekeepers like newspapers are effectively controlled by a handful of
people, who decide what news goes in and what doesn't. Technorati
filters blogs based on links and traffic, which are effectively votes.
Is there a "power law" distribution effect? Probably. But that
doesn't mean new voices can't make their way into the discussion in a
way they can't where real gatekeepers are concerned. As for why most
of those other blogs aren't getting attention, maybe it's because what
they're saying is only of interest to a small group.
I'm not saying that filters aren't important, or that influential
bloggers don't play a role. I'm just saying that it's qualitatively
different from what Old Media gatekeepers do. In the end, I suspect
that we agree more than we disagree.
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Let them eat cake.
Matt, you *are* a gatekeeper! You have a professional media gig. To write that there are no gatekeepers, low barriers, simply from your own experience, is a classic blindness.
Yes, there is a very small group of people who determine what gets heard overall. This is established anytime someone does some counting.
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Your chance of staring a blog and getting recognized is exactly parallel your chance of sending your column to editors and getting published to a wide audience. In both cases, it can happen, if you're in the right place and the right time. But there's a lot of unsuccessful attempts for every winner. In the blog case, if lightning doesn't strike, you'll "publish" it to a few friends of family members, which is frankly often NOT the goal (no offense to the people who are happy talking to crickets, but many aren't).
I mean, what would convince you? What argument could be made that you would consider? Would you always say something like, anyone can plunk down a dollar in the lottery and win, so there's no barrier to riches in the lotterysphere.. And people can waste away fortunes, so that (fallaciously) proves there's no inheritance advantage.
We know that the structure of audience is a power-law, an exponential distribution. This has been well-studied, and repeatedly established. That is, for a given topic, there's a few people with a lot of readers, and everyone else.
See, e.g. this essay by someone else:
http://civilities.net/TheNewGatekeepers
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That is, if "old meda" chances are "one in a million"
And "new media" chances are "two in a million".
One could say "chances of success in new media are DOUBLE that of old media" - it would be true. But it would also be true that both chances are basically zero for many practical purposes.
What commentators often miss, is that the lowered barrier to having material produced intrinsically raises the barrier to having it effectively distributed (getting heard over noise). So the net effect is pretty much exactly the same for almost everyone, in terms of facing barriers to entry. There's a very tiny subset of people who have overcome the distribution barrier, so they are utterly in love with the lowering of the production barrier - it's great for them.
No offense intended. I discuss some of these issues myself e.g. this old blog post:
http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/0006...
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And it's not like I am being inconsistent...I really do believe that the emergence of blogs and low-barrier publishing serves to further illustrate how valuable The Brand (aka the sum total of experience associated with a given "thing") is.
Great discussion.
-- Stuart
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