When blogs go bye-bye.

Don't know if it is just an odd coincidence or there has been legal action that is making some folks nervous, but two blogs I've read regularly have announced in the past couple of weeks that they are shuttering.
One is the GannettBlog. FireJoeMorgan and MediaWhoresOnline have also gone away in recent years. And Drudge seems to be a shadow of its former self.
Don't know if it's the media criticism, the comments or what, but perhaps not only is journalism is in trouble, independent blogs might be in a winnowing out process as well.

 

There's not much money in blogs right now. Hopkins was struggling to raise money for his Gannett blog.

 

I think there has always been a thread of thought that this would happen eventually, even academic economic/J-school studies about it. The novelty is wearing off. No one wants to work for free. Or at least not enough to sustain the blogosphere as it exists in 2009. I don't think Wikipedia will survive long-term either without pumping some money into the enterprise for labor.

The basic fundamentals of economics don't change much from century to century. Nobody likes to work for free and that is as true today as it was B.C.

 

Who criticized FireJoeMorgan?

The main recipient of the blog skewering never knew what a blog was.

 

Nobody wants to work for free, but a J-school grad will work for $25,000 with no overtime and no 401k, which is pretty close.

 

But that's not the reason. Hopkins said he made more than he expected but it was time for something new. He started a new blog for homosexual men called Ibiza Confidential.

 

Tey gays are taking over the world but they won't take over the GannettBlog! It ain't fair.

 

Yeah, I know. But he was setting goals of fundraising, and not meeting them.

It's too bad. He really was doing Gannett employees a service, once you got past the ridiculous comments made by certain people.

 

FireJoeMorgan posted on its own demise. The basic decision was that the lead writer's avocation had become a drag on his vocation. Easy to see that.
On the other hand, in my day job this afternoon, I read a story about a woman whose official job title is Head Blogger for Campbell Soup Co. Maybe that's where blogs are headed-just most advertising swill.

 

Nobody wants to work for free, but Twitter is all the rage and has never made a dime for anyone. I am completely convinced the ultimate goal for Twitter's founders is to make it such a big pop-culture thing that Google or Yahoo or AOL or some other large-bucks entity buys it for a billion. Just like YouTube, which, according to a report I heard on NPR yesterday, is still losing money for Google.

 

Which begs the question: Why in the world would anyone decide to read a Campbell's Soup blog?

 

Seems like you've thrown an Aardvark in with the apples and oranges.

Drudge is, was and will ever be a news aggregation site, not anything like a blog.

He keeps a very low profile personally these days but the site seems to hum right along – I assume it's being operated behind the scenes by worker bees.