Wired pwns Jason Calacanis
If you haven’t been reading Techmeme, you should be. Techmeme crawls the blogosphere searching for hot posts and groups related ones- sort of like Google news. The aggregation of related posts lets you browse conversations between bloggers in close to real time, and sometimes results in amusing point-counterpoint pairs like this:
Jason Calacanis attacks the Wired reporter, and Wired snaps right back at him, all presented in an orderly fashion for your viewing pleasure. Of course Valleywag is all over this, as are a bunch of other people. Techmeme lays the debate out evenly, presenting both sides of the story. Side by side, the contrast between Calacanis’ arrogant, angry diatribe against journalists and Wired’s witty, clever response is clear. There can be no comparison between preselected emailed form questions and a live conversation. Wired is not some fly-by-night gossip rag that misquotes people it interviews on purpose. Either Calacanis is incredibly arrogant and closed-minded, or a brilliant linkbaiter. I honestly don’t know which it is. And as for the 10,000 daily readers Calacanis has that render old-school magazines like Wired obsolete? Looking at the comments on Calacanis’ own blog, most of them are firmly against him, and email interviews in general.
As much as I rely on email for communication, whenever I am brainstorming with someone else, I always do it in real-time, either through IM or phone. Live communication lets ideas bounce around and transform as they instantly interact with each other, creating something greater than the sum of its parts. This applies as much to interviews as it does to product development. An interview is supposed to be, first and foremost, a conversation, and a good interview a natural conversation, where the subject forgets he is being interviewed and just…talks. Email is a formal written questionnaire to fill out and mail back. The differences between the two are enormous.
Other Thoughts:
Siding with Jason Calacanis:
- Matthew Ingram, a journalist himself, loves email interviews because they are easier.
- Mark Evans says it’s Calacanis’ right to decide the type of interview
Siding with Wired:
- Giovanni Rodriguez says that most of the time, it is journalists who force the medium on the interviewee- pretty much the exact opposite of Mark Evans’ argument.
- Tom O’Leary doesn’t see what the big deal is. The big deal is of course the battle between old and new media implicit in this conflict.
- Brad Linder, another journalist, points out several problems with email interviews.
And my favorite comment on the whole thing: Martha Feingold cleverly labels this as “one of those totally incestuous blogosphere blow-ups” and notes that nobody outside blog/tech media circles gives a shit about any of this. She’s right. When you really think about it, even the whole old media/new media battle was largely made up by bloggers who fancied themselves champions of a new era, here to overthrow the old fogey newspaper magnates who know nothing about media. Wired, with a print circulation far greater than Jason Calcanis’ audience, doesn’t seem to mind.
Anyway, it seems that the point is moot. In the time I spent writing this post, the situation has been resolved- exactly as Ian Betteridge presciently suggested.
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Hey, you there in the corner! You should be our next featured blogger…right?
I’m not sure how you interpreted either of my two posts about this as siding with anyone. I think that the whole thing is nuts. If you read my latest post, my objectivity might be a bit clearer.
http://www.messagingtimes.com/blog/?p=834
Stuff like this is mad. A story about an interview that didn’t happen getting more press than interviews that do is evidence of the new media in action.
All the best
Tom
Tom,
I assumed that by saying this was no big deal you were criticizing Calacanis for making a big deal out of it. It was his indignant post that started this whole thing.
But of course we bloggers must always remain objective
Understandable. As the story unfolds, I’m simply becoming more and more amused by it all. If they don’t move on, they’ll clog the tubes soon with it all.
We can try to be objective - but it appears that the mob prefers it when we’re at each other’s throats. One aspect of traditional media that hasn’t changed since the rebirth of the Internet: Dog bites man isn’t news. Man bites dog is. Now if Jason would just bite the reporter, then we’d have a story on our hands.
All the best
Tom
I thought this was the best sum up of it:
http://www.crunchnotes.com/?p=386
The whole thing shocked the heck out of me, that’s for sure. Wish someone would explain to me how techmeme works, cuz I still can’t understand what the fuss is about.
Makes me wonder about all those folks who have become champions of algorithms instead of human editors, though. Was this really the most important story in the world of high tech today? C’mon.
Bottom line: there isn’t a right or wrong answer when it comes to the best way to interview people. I insist on phone or in person, but that’s just what I’ve found works best for me after 22 years as a journalist. Jason says phone isn’t a good use of his time. I say email isn’t a good use of my time. Big deal. There isn’t a day that goes by where I ask for an interview and get turned away. No one talks to me to do me any favors. If they think they can get something out of it, they say yes. If there is too much downside, they say no.
Fred Vogelstein
Wired Magazine
415 276 4922
Whatever happened to medium as message? You ask via email, you get email-filtered answers, you ask in-person, you get more immediate answers. Fred’s right - I can’t understand what the fuss is about. Incest is alive and well: the “blogosphere” should realise that it’s part of, and should aspire to being part of, the broader media dialogue. Perhaps not playing up these schoolyard spats would be a start. You’ve written about A-listers, Ilya, and the only reason this ’story’ made it to your front page is they’re A-listers. Non-representative, yet perfectly typical also.
[…] Calacanis was arrogant. I think, some of the bloggers who read how he reacts with some issues through his blog will call […]
Hi Fred. Techmeme tracks conversations that take place on the Internet. It isn’t purely algorithmic in nature and there are human players who vet the content that appears to ensure that it is relevant to the original discussion and from a reputable source. I’m not sure how this vetting is done though. I do know that I wrote two commentaries on the subject yesterday and my blog wasn’t included in the discussion thread on techmeme. I guess I’m not in the reputable category yet.
What surprises me most about this ongoing conversation is the platform-centric views of both parties involved. Communication can be effective over multiple platforms, and I would expect most people today to be somewhat flexible in this regard. In online marketing, for example, campaigns are seldom run on only one of the existing communication platforms on the web. Effective communication involves a combination of email, RSS, blogs, discussion boards, multimedia, search engines and even (shock horror) traditional comm channels to reach targeted audiences.
The reality is that although A-list bloggers play an important role in online communication, their audience is not all that large. There are local newspapers with readerships larger than many of the leading blogs. That said, their audience is generally highly targeted to particular subcultures on the Internet (tech, mothers, politics, etc). Steve Rubel recently posted a graph from Forrester Research which shows that 52 percent of the US online-audience doesn’t participate in reading blogs, creating content, using RSS or other activities online: http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/04/forresters_part.html
That said, the A-list bloggers and other new technology participants are the early adapters that are at the forefront of the shift from traditional media to interactive conversations on the Internet. As we evolve, we are seeing a growing demand for a more continuous flow of information that comes to us in a personalized form.
All the best
Tom
…and we want to be engaged in it all. Not merely as readers; but creators and active participants in the discussions taking place (as evidenced by yesterday’s conversations about this topic which were tracked by techmeme, digg, reddit, etc.)
As content consumers, we are ravenous today; but our attention shifts quickly and focus is spread across multiple ongoing streams of conversation taking place continuously over different platforms (blogs, twitter, discussion boards, email, RSS feeds, multimedia, etc.) As a matter of fact, I’m shifting now from this topic to an entirely different focus - gotta run!