Cult of the Amateur

For someone who earns a living through consideration of outbreaks of The Future, it’s all useful information, but that’s all it is. For the parsing and condensation of that information into knowledge, it seems we still need the structure of print publishing, a form that insists on time to think, digest and present. While I will write about things that relate to Wired UK’s fields of interest in the coming months, for this first issue it’s worth standing outside in the cold away from the internet and consider why print and newspaper/magazine structures still exist. Because reporting and editing are honest-to-God actual fucking jobs that don’t get taught at the Huffington Post and the Daily Beast, and because all those faceless blog-networks infesting the Bay Area like tongue herpes have no interest in their minimum-wage blogmonkeys thinking about anything bigger than their hitcount. These things are fun and great for finding out about paedo-paramedics and Ukrainian porn, but they shouldn’t be confused with informed reportage and actual thinking.

"We're living in the last days of the Roman Empire" By Warren Ellis|14 April 2009 Wired UK 05.09

My favourite examples of relentless struggle with Cult of amateur is company that has origin it internet itself – Cnet Networks.
CNet started as a web-only play in pre .com era times. It’s business model developed alongside development of Internet. Those two entities were closely associated for almost two decades. As a result CNet managed to become one of the most recognizable and of the most trusted brands on the internet.
As a company with origins within internet/virtual area it’s not facing a painful transition to all-digital distribution. This gives CNet huge advantage over mainstream media sites such as the New York Times.

Unfortunately over the last two years Cnet’s biggest strength became Achilles’ heel.Rapid development of web 2.0 social network sites and stronger then ever culture of blogging pushes CNet out of mainstream of information technology websites.
Revenues are down, number of page views per month as well as number of unique users is decreasing. Doest it mean that CNet’s business model had it’s own five minutes and now became obsolete? Maybe it’s general reflection of the state of the whole internet based advertising business model?

Overlooked web 2.0 competition;
Born of Blogospehere and web 2.0 internet / social network has huge impact on CNet's value role in the content value chain. Particularly in area of content aggregation sites, CNet’s position been severely weakened. Creating must-read content and community is a do-or-die issue at the Internet firm.
To some extent bloggers are increasingly respected (by users) as quality journalists and analysts who in some cases have more expertise than the technology journalists that are covering the same story, product, or events.
CNet has never found a way to build an effective community around any of their brands. New Social media of web 2.0 are becoming increasingly important. New mega-aggravation-sites like Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us are claiming larger shares of the time spent online. Static libraries of "expert" content may become less of an asset in the years ahead.

Rise of new web 2.0 quality blogs
Another threat is the rise of leaner competitors like Ars Technica. It’s much smaller, has decentralized operations, keeps even core stuff to absolute minimun and as a recult depends heavily on freelancers. As a result overall overhead is extremely low. What makes the biggest difference is really efficient, web focused, editing and publishing process. Contributors, journalists and writers in general communicate with their editors on internet chats and through emails. All stories are posted directly on the website.
Key factor is not even strength of particular CNet’s competitors but it’s number.
Many of those competitors managed to attract huge number of users and followers much more loyal then CNet’s users.

Shift of readers preferences
Majority of the people would like to see balanced, objective and quality reporting but they will spend more time reading blog s containing snippets of information delivered in no time in comparison to CNet’slengthy publishing proceed. Web analytics identified growing trend of shifting readers prefernces. Average user expect snippets of information delivered on time instead of lengthy blocks of text.

CNet Networks is a great example of company which has origins in digital age, managed to remain on the top of the league for a decade and then clearly run of ideas how compete in new business environment. Reinvention of internet with web 2.0 puts question mark even over companies like CNet. Social Networking, blogospere(s), introduction of YouTube not only attracted millions of users but also what’s more important reshaped the way how users interact with information.
For more than decade CNet seems to developed perfect recipe how to blend high quality journalism into profitable on-line content. Highly acclaimed CNet’s business model was copied by many but none of the competitors managed to get close or even achieve similar success.

Introduction of blogs brought content creation and article turnover into different level, not necessary in the terms of quality. Instant news alerts, news coverage and on line discussions became part of users expectations. Pendulum swung towards speed.
CNet given it’s current position has great opportunities to become technological forerunner again. The biggest challenge is to reinvent themselves. Bring high quality information into web 2.0 and be really innovative again.