Is it tacky to quote yourself? Let’s see, back in my second post here I was talking about Gawker and blogmills and their relation to the media. Toward the end I wrote something like this:

“…but what’d I’d like to read is a comparison of the biggest, most successful of these blogs, Gizmodo and Kotaku, with their Weblogs Inc. equivalents Engadget and Joystiq and maybe some of the other popular tech blogs like Slashdot or something. How have these blogs, which get upwards of 4 million pageviews per week, changed the technology/computing industry? Have they actually broken any ground or are they just mouthpieces for endless PR departments? … I understand it’s a totally different article, but it seems more relevant.”

Well, I kinda got my wish in Wired this month with a throwdown on the rivalry between Engadget and Gizmodo, even better, staged at the 2008 International CES.

Carlye Adler’s article nicely characterizes the rivalry and is a great read for anyone who reads techblogs Engadget or Gizmodo or is just interested in how these two behemoths of blogging conduct themselves. It doesn’t have all the discussion of the implications to traditional media I was looking for, but it does have a good section where it recounts Gizmodo’s TV-B-Gone stunt:

“Jeremy Dale, Motorola’s vice president of global marketing, was demonstrating two new mobile phones to a preshow crowd at CES when his teleprompter suddenly clicked off. Seconds later, the display screen behind him went black. When he moved to another screen, it clicked off as well. Throughout the course of the week, similar things kept happening to other companies. TVs went dark at Intel, more went out at Dish Network, and a whole wall of monitors went dead, one by one, at Panasonic. (The 150-incher stayed on.)

At the time, no one knew that Richard Blakeley, a cameraman for Gawker Media and Gizmodo, was the puppeteer behind the prank. Armed with a little device called TV-B-Gone, he prowled the floor, extinguishing the demos and displays that are CES’ lifeblood.”

Later:

“…some argued that with TV-B-Gone, the Gizmodo gang had crossed the line from irreverence to hostility.

…

Other bloggers were similarly unamused. For years, they had struggled to earn the respect accorded to members of the traditional media. Now one of the most prominent bloggers — one of the few to win a broadcast media pass! — was squandering that hard-earned credibility.”

Gizmodo editor Brian Lam defended the actions (it’s “an important part of the tech culture that isn’t sold in a can.”), but the videographer responsible for the deed was banned from CES.

Gizmodo’s joke (crappy, unprofessional is how I’d describe it) illustrates how blogs are separating themselves from traditional media, as they in some ways supercede it and out-report print. Even Engadget, with its “cool and straightlaced” style, isn’t above posting a bit of badly-sourced news.

“Last May, Engadget published news that the release of Apple’s iPhone and Leopard operating system would be delayed. Apple stock plunged, causing a $4 billion drop in the company’s market cap. But Engadget’s only source, an email purportedly sent to Apple employees, turned out to be a fraud.”

Despite their faults, “Lam, 30, and [Engadget Editor Ryan] Block, 25, are influential forces in the $161 billion consumer electronics industry, more powerful than most of the mainstream media outlets they compete against,” according to Wired.

There’s still a strong sense, however, that now that these blogs have found success, they’ve found the formula, how do they fit into the media industry? Some bloggers don’t feel they’re bound by the same rules as traditional media, whereas others are trying to play by the rules without sacrificing what makes blogging great: the immediacy.

The fact that most tech-heads use one of these blogs (or both) as their primary source of news might prove that that question is moot. Readers don’t care about the relatively infrequent mistakes (as long as they’re corrected quickly), they don’t care about the stunts, they just want the news, and fast.

As great as that is, there’s still a sense that blogs as a whole and these blogs in particular haven’t established a place for themselves in the media industry. I just want to ask them, “Are you going to destroy the industry or become a part of it? Which ever it is, do it already!”

David Pouge, tech reviewer for the New York Times, seems to have a pretty balanced view of the whole thing, “They have to figure out what they want to be when they grow up,” he says. “And they are going to continue to stub their toes along the way.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 7:19 pm and is filed under Featured, internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.