Boycott Wired or Chris Anderson is a foof

So let me get this straight ...

Chris Anderson spends a significant amount of time researching and writing a book (which I'm going to go out on a limb and guess most complaining here haven't read), y'all find one interview he's done, routinely name call and rip Anderson without getting to any of the substance of what he's saying and it's the blogs of the world that are the problem?

Look, I'm not saying the concepts behind Anderson's book are going to provide newspapers or any other industry with the business model of the future. That said, you can't deny that the things he's writing about are taking place and having some success.

Also, Anderson does step back slightly from what he said in the article here
http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-chris-andersons-unbelievably-annoying-interview-with-spiegel-2009-7#comment-4a7091d70c21c27059305961

Anderson practices what he preaches here. The book costs money but you can read the digital version for free or listen to the audiobook for free.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/17135767/FREE-full-book-by-Chris-Anderson-Read-in-Fullscreen
http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/products/ProductDetail.jsp?productID=BK_AVEN_000001&BV_UseBVCookie=Yes

 

If you mean he spent a significant amount of time copying and pasting from Wikipedia, then you'd be right. Because that's what he did.
The article noted that the book was free, if you did a little digging around.
The problem is that Anderson is trying to pass himself off as a new media age guru, when, quite frankly, he doesn't have a damn clue what's going to happen next because nobody knows what's going to happen next.
And writers of note -- see link to Gladwell's review -- have trashed the book from end to the other. As have the people at the country's finest magazine -- The Virginia Quarterly Review.

 

I could give a flip about whether freedarko is based on MSM reports or not. That doesn't make up for the thousands of blogs that merely link and kibitz.

And having read it...I don't understand your reverence. It links to YouTube and rambles in a way that would make HST scratch his head.

 

Dooley, I know your hectic posting schedule can't help your reading comprehension, but Jesus Christ, would it kill you to pay attention to what I'm saying?

 

More to the point, you keep moving the goalposts. We started this un-enlightening exchange when I responded to leo's contention that blogs just parrot newspapers. You added that, for the most part, blogs are just a "CB radio"-style hobby...which may be true, but doesn't seem relevant.

Sure, for every TMZ -- or FreeDarko, or KSK, or I Can Haz Cheezburger, or Warming Glow, or dozens of others -- there are thousands of failed or unoriginal blogs. But I submit that for every brilliantly written and reported newspaper story, there are tens of thousands of failed or unoriginal stories, cobbled together from incomplete sources or illustrating bogus "trends."

The point is that a blog -- like, say, a newspaper -- is just a medium. The quality of work produced by a blog -- or, say, a newspaper -- is dependent on the talent and work ethic of the people who produce it. Saying all blogs are bad, or all blogs are parasites, isn't just unhelpful and unoriginal. It's demonstrably untrue.

 

But a story doesn't have to be necessarily brilliant to tell people that something is happening. And I didn't say all blogs are bad; many are good as sources of commentary. But to say they're ready to be the go-to place for original news is absurd, and TMZ getting a close-up of a dying Michael Jackson doesn't mitigate that opinion. Because to be a reliable source of news, you can't do it as a hobby, and you can't do it for free, and it takes a long time for a blog to be at the level at which a news source will give you the time of day.

 

I was aware it was available online for free. Just struck me as odd. Thanks for the links.

I think the aformentioned New Yorker article countered the book convincingly. I'll have to read Free to see if there's any cracks in the counterargument, but the excerpts I've read haven't swayed me in the least.

 

And now we're in agreement. That was fun.

But...it doesn't mitigate it even a little bit? Not at all? Really? Pourquoi pas?

 

I'm in whole-hearted agreement with the sentiments being expressed about most blogs as compared to traditional newspapers, and the fact that the former are much more reliant on the latter than they really realize.

That being said, Chris Anderson may be a jackass, and a plagiarist, and he may be hypocritical. But I fear that he also is right.

We care how the general public gets its news, and we care, and hope, that it's correct, intelligent, informative and current. These days, I am less sure that the readers care much about any of that, though.

They want what they want, how they want it, and when, preferably without too much intellectual exercise or negativity.

And, with so many ways to get news, they don't seem to care where it originally comes from. As far as they're concerned, it comes from wherever they get it.

 

If I were starting a writing-based enterprise, print or Web or a combination of the two, I'd want dools and Wingman on staff.

Gentlemen, expect a call when I win the Powerball lottery.