Weingarten: "Brand this!"

Leslie's paper is about 100x better than Weingarten's column.

 

Name the sports columnists who built their brand without also working in radio and TV while doing their columnist jobs in newspapers.

 

Newspapers have very very strong brands, which they're doing their best to destroy. But if an individual writer has a brand, that means said writer is almost surely an insufferable poseur. Individuals have identities, things have brands.

 

I'll take the contra on this and say that writers have always had brands. Of a kind. They were not called 'brands' of course, they were called 'reputations.' And while they weren't known necessarily to the public, they were well known to editors and publishers and that's how writers moved from job to job - on the strength of their reputations. Or 'brand.'

In Rice's day, or Lardner's or Runyon's or Cannon's or Breslin's, your 'brand' was used almost exclusively to sell to the trade. The difference today is that we're being called upon to sell ourselves retail to the (wired worldwide) general public.

 

In many cases, it's like the college football players wanting to claim value independent of the university, stadium, tradition, history, donations, etc., that made it possible. The newspaper brands made it possible for columnists to make a name for themselves. Absent that, you're just another guy on the web, until you demonstrate you have what it takes to get people to read.

 

I'm not sure I could say it any better.

 

I would just like to find the person who invented the concept of "branding" and have him or her drawn and quartered. Perhaps even eighthed.

 

The person has been dead for hundreds of years.

 

The first time I heard "branding" used as a personal trait it was the Girls Gone Wild guy. I think the next time I heard it used it was the Kardashians.

 

Interesting you should name these two.

The Girls Gone Wild guy admittedly co-opted Hugh Hefner's brand.

Kim Kardashian began as basically an extension of Paris Hilton's brand.

Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart, Rachael Ray and others have all developed personal brands that they built businesses around. Food Network in particular has been a launching pad for personal brands.

And, really, Hugh Hefner remains the gold standard for someone building a business empire around their own personal brand.

 

The branding stuff in the column is less interesting to me than the stuff about photo galleries of cats. And the giving people what we think they want. I know managers who literally use the term "click bait," with a straight face, and spend half their days building photo galleries of Wimbledon's hottest babes.

The branding stuff? Eh, I can see both sides of that. But too many stupid people have been put in charge and think the answer to our woes is controversy-free journalism, "local fan of the day!" and photo galleries of Cheerleaders Through the Years.

 

But I don't know why Weingarten equated the idea of branding with photo galleries of cats in his response.

They're not the same thing.