On Tuesday night, I found my way into a noisy cocktail party at the 92YTribeca, where I knew no-one in the crowd of twittering 20-somethings.
Billed as a night of networking, conversation and new ideas, I entered the buzzy, jargon-filled world of Mashable NextUp NYC .
But it was too noisy for conversational networking and most attendees were too busy staring at their iPhones to bother reading each other's name tags. I was, however, approached by a very nice PR woman for Gerber and Nestle, who remembered me from another event and we had an interesting chat about the delicate business of approaching bloggers about product giveaways.
The state of the NYC Blogosphere was the question of the night and a line-up of "high-profile" speakers tried to tease out an answer.
Mostly, the speakers, some who came prepared, some who spoke off the cuff, approached the topic circuitously but some revealed themselves to be savvy mediafarians, unable to fathom a world where people don't spend their day staring at an iPhone.
Maybe that cool rectangle is the brave new world.
But if Twitter is the state of the blogsphere I feel alienated—even if I do spend my day staring at my iPhone (and maybe I should actually activate my Twitter account).
Still, disappointment pulsed through my veins. I was hoping for something really exciting and visionary. But there was no vision in sight: The NYC new media world is just like the old media world dressed in cool tech clothing.
For me this event was the opposite of the Brooklyn Blogfest as it had none of the local fervor, social
activism, entrepreneurial passion or nutty creativity of that event. And there was
absolutely no mention of Brooklyn, which is KNOWN to have more blogs than anywhere else in the USA.
For this crowd, New York blogging is Gawker and Nick Denton. End of story.
It's all about page views, ad sales and how to drive people to your site with clickable headlines. Which isn't to say that I didn't learn a hunk about what's going on in the big city. Because I did.
In fact, I much enjoyed adorable Nicholas Carlson's spiel about how to write a headline. A senior editor of Silicon Alley Insider, he was funny without being snarky and quite smart about this twittering, new media world.
The word aggregation was in high usage. But Carlson did say humorously, "It is a good idea to bring something original to the Internet from time to time."
This was not an entrepreneurial group of self-starters. These were bloggers and publicity folks who probably studied new media at college and actually get paid to work for some of the larger blogs like Gizmodo, CNET, Gawker, The Daily Beast and Silicon Alley Insider. They graduated into a world where "print is dead" and they have little sentimentality about that and no intention of going to journalism school.
Which is fine by me. But some old-school-types find that vexing. Like the 30-year-old guy sitting next to me, who grumbled, "Would you want to see a doctor who didn't go to medical school."
A communications professor, he sneered at the idea that anyone can be a journalist. "This generation is so entitled," he told me.
I did enjoy Caroline McCarthy, a staff writer of CNET News/CBS Interactive, who told a funny story about posting a photograph of a hula hoop in the hallway of her East Village apartment building to Twitte. The next day, she heard from her downstairs' neighbors, who twittered back with: 'Hey that's our hula hoop.'
"That's how you meet your neighbors in 21st century Manhattan," she told the crowd. That got a big laugh and I loved it.
We bloggers in Brooklyn are always wondering where all the local Manhattan blogs are. But I guess the Manhattan scene is, like Manhattan, younger, glitzier and more fame and fortune-oriented.
Hyperlocal it ain't. This crowd wants to reach the millions out there who read Boing Boing and watch You Tube. They want the hits and the ad revenue.I know, I know, you gotta make money somehow. But still…
When new media becomes status quo it does lose its edgy eccentricity. Maybe that's why it's still so scrappy and fun out here in Brooklyn. Even better, Manhattan doesn't even know we exist.
Ond day soon they'll find out about us. Just like the Manhattan-centric, once upon a time, discovered the clubs, restaurants, and art spaces of Williamsburg, the great restaurants of Fifth and Smith and the brownstones of Park Slope.
Feeling under the weather like everyone else I know AND eager to get home to Obama's speech, I dragged my sorry and misunderstood Brooklyn self out onto the streets of Tribeca.
I left before the keynote,which meant I didn't get get to hear Bryan Keefer, who is director of product for The Daily Beast.(what does that mean?) and co- authorr All the President’s Spin: George W. Bush, the Media, and the Truth.
The book grew out of Spinsanity.org, a group blog he co-founded that
was devoted to debunking political spin.
The Daily Beast, isn't that Tina Brown's new blog? I wonder if she's ever been to Brooklyn?
Great report, Louise. This is the kind of thing only a blog like yours – or the kind of thing similar and dissimilar blogs represented in the Brooklyn Blogfest – do better than anyone/anywhere else.
Thanks so much.
Caroline, from my own independent surveying, the East Village is next in line with a great # of neighborhood blogs after the Brooklyn neighborhoods! (Check out evgrieve.com who probably links to the rest of them.)
Thank you, Louise. I loved reading this. I was wondering how blogging, etc. will get co-opted and now have an idea. It doesn’t have to all be bad but I just wonder what will get lost.
More power to the Brooklyn Blogfest which sets a tone that is indeed needed. Such a great way to describe it: “For me this event was the Brookyn Blogfest with none of the local fervor, social activism, entrepreneurial passion or nutty creativity. And there was absolutely no mention of Brooklyn, which is KNOWN to have more blogs than anywhere else in the USA.”
Can you post (don’t know if you did…) when events like this are happening?
Cathryn.
Being fairly anti-social, hyper-local, decidedly un-hip, and at least a decade older than the 20-somethings you describe, I always hesitate to even say I have a blog. I usually say “my website” or something equally ambiguous. I toyed with putting ads on Best View in Brooklyn, but I didn’t think I’d have enough people visiting to make it worthwhile. Lately, I’ve been re-considering. My stubborn “I don’t want to answer to anyone” self shuns the idea. My “Oh crap, I have to put something back before paying” wallet does not.
Your observation about the “driving people to your site” is why (I believe) many sites try to be shocking or offensive just to get more traffic. Ick. To skim through the comments on some of those sites is a mixture of the ugliest in racism of all kinds, misogyny, attention craving, and pseudo-clever “I get it and they don’t” winking; who says the 80’s had the ME generation?
I am saddened by the seeming downfall of paper newspapers. For one thing, it seems like readers actually READ print media; they don’t just skim for something to quickly comment on. There’s also more accountability when an author can’t sneak back and change what has been “published.” There’s more accountability when someone is paying for your paper directly, not by having Google Ads blinking on the page. There are fewer typos, guesses, “I think it’s probably kind of correct,” and musings when it’s print and it takes more than a click to post information. I don’t pretend for a second that BViB is journalism. I don’t attach my name to BViB, and for that reason alone, I can’t and won’t ever claim that it’s really journalism. I don’t think most of the Brooklyn blogs that I frequent would claim that either.
The things that get posted to many of these blogs are personal essays, observations, commentary. And that’s worthwhile in its own way. A few do get out and do research and obtain interviews that are NOT done with Google news alerts or other on-line sources. That’s closer to journalism. Your run-down of last evening’s get-together taught me that I must not actually have a blog. It’s actually just a weblog.
I was at the event last night too and wholeheartedly agree with your assessment. As a former editor-in-chief of a web 2.0 startup, I found that the speakers offered nothing new to broaden my awareness of the so-called NY blogosphere. In fact, the one question I never got to ask (since I was sitting in the corner and they couldn’t see me frantically waving my arms) was one that you pose above:
“We bloggers in Brooklyn are always wondering who are the local bloggers”
As a newcomer to the blogging world, I would be most interested in finding out more about local bloggers. Who are they? How do we find them? I have come across your blog often and think it’s fantastic. Wish I knew you were at the event. Why weren’t you a headliner?
Glad you liked the hula hoop story, and thanks for coming!
I do, however, want to take issue with the “Would you want to see a doctor who didn’t go to medical school” remark — that’s apples and oranges in my opinion. I didn’t go to journalism school because I was offered an entry-level reporting job without it, and hence had the option to learn a craft from skilled editors and reporters (my colleagues’ resumes run the gamut from BusinessWeek to the LA Times), while earning a modest salary. If I’d gone to journalism school, I would’ve driven myself into debt from paying tuition while being uncertain about what the job market would be when I graduated.
It’s not a new phenomenon; many of my 30- and 40-something colleagues who picked up the profession a decade or two ago did not attend journalism school either. My background was so completely off-the-grid (I was a history of science major) that when I interviewed for the CNET job, the editors had to give me a writing test because I had no writing samples to provide.
Anyone can *try* to be a journalist, and anyone can contribute to the news. Making a living off it, well, we all know that isn’t easy. Most of the audience, we knew in advance, was coming from the marketing and PR sectors and was interested in hearing about blogging as a business and its potential for profit in the current advertising recession.
So that’s why we talked about what we talked about. As an East Villager — a neighborhood that SHOULD have a great culture of independent blogging — I’m jealous of how well they’ve caught on in Brooklyn. That said, if my downstairs neighbor is any indicator, maybe we are on our way. :)