The Future Of Journalism Is Marketing
This is what I learned today reading blogs:
1. It's ok if you obliterate the line between objective journalist and conflicted story participant as long as you admit you're conflicted while entertainingly and very publicly attacking anyone who points out you're more walking billboard than journalist.
2. Standards and ethics are for pussies.
3. You can make more money being the Ann Coulter of technology blogging than Walter Cronkite. You'll also always be in the right, even when you're wrong because the employees of companies who need your adver-journalizing will always kiss your ass. So will investors and the marketing folks who'd love to see a future where the the only news consumers get IS marketing. That leaves only consumer advocates and people with ethics left to criticize you, and they're irrelevant.
4. A journalist and/or blogger's job is no longer to get at the unpleasant truth, but to make money for oneself as part of a multi-million dollar self-promotion empire.
5. It isn't a story unless it involves a corporation either selling something or re-arranging its deck chairs in order to sell something. If you can be the FIRST to state that something is being sold, you're a Pulitzer shoe-in. Look at Techmeme. See anyone talking about how technology actually impacts humans in any substantive way? Blogging from a humanistic, consumer-focused perspective is for hippies and communists.
6. Readers in this country are smart enough to understand the multitude of financial connections and biases for everything they read, so the dividing line between PR and journalism isn't necessary.
7. Adver-marketing-journalism. It's the future. Get on board or be irrelevant.