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June 18, 2006
AOL Revamps Netscape As Collaborative News Portal
The above headline ran above a story on Media Post Online by Wendy Davis on June 15. On the same day CJR Daily had a headline that read, "Bloggers Pounce on the New Netscape." The CJR Daily is the Columbia Journalism Review daily online edition--it publishes good, solid, reasonable criticism of the media.
The difference between the two online stories highlights the difference between journalistic publishers who try to present balanced news and bloggers. Media Post is a dependable news source for stories about the media--informed, straightforward, and, well, you know--boring. Kinda' like Mormons. Media Post has to share the master with several wives, like in "Big Love"--online readers, big media executives, advertising agencies, and advertisers--so Media Post can't be too individualistic or piss any of the other wives off.
The great thing about bloggers is they don't give a shit. They say what they think--pure opinion--and they let the chips fall where they might.
The Media Post story indicated AOL was positioning the new Netscape "...along the lines of the popular Diggs.com." Later on in the story, Davis writes, "But--in a twist absent from Diggs.com--AOL has hired a team of bloggers and editors, which it calls 'anchors,' to follow the to follow up on selected stories with further reporting." Sounds almost like a lift from an AOL press release.
The bloggers CJR quotes know a twist--a Jack Twist--when they see one. They call the Netscape what it is, a clone of Diggs.com, a rip-off. People and companies don't change their bad habits. AOL has always been a copycat, which in the media is no sin, but AOL has committed the sin of copying stuff badly and too late. While AOL was figuring out how to get on the blogging bandwagon (not creating anything itself, but buying someone else's blogging aggregator), ex-AOL executive Ken Lerer and Arianne Huffington created the hottest and most interesting blog in cyberspace--the Huffington Post.
Media Post and other well meaning publishers (including the NY Times and Wall Steet Journal) will continue to run stories about AOL because it's still a big company (but a company that is doing it's utmost to shrink fast). But the dirty secret that the bloggers know is that AOL doesn't matter any more. AOL is even more like the Mormons than the worthy Media Post. AOL is just another out-of-date organization that has become best suited for parodies.
Posted by Charles Warner at 11:08 PM
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