eric tatro dot com » Blogs

Metallica invites bloggers to listen to new album, won’t let them write about it

Eric — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:21:22 +0000

Usually, when a company invites the media or bloggers to an event to offer an exclusive early look at a product, the goal is to encourage said media or bloggers to write about that product. When Metallica invited bloggers to listen to its upcoming album, reviews inevitably popped up on the Web; reviews which Metallica’s management promptly “forced” bloggers to take down.

“The Quietus kept our article up the longest and, as no non-disclosure agreement had been signed, [was] not prepared to remove it merely due to the demands of Metallica’s management,” Turner continued. “We only eventually removed the article earlier today to protect the professional interests of the writer concerned (the piece was written anonymously).”

Metallica has a long history of alienating their biggest fans, and clearly fears digital media, but this feels clumsy and ham-fisted even for them. If the album mix wasn’t final, they shouldn’t have invited writers to listen to it and then act shocked when they, you know, wrote about it.

Do we need a new way to “spray thoughts across the web?”

Eric — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:15:38 +0000

Today Six Apart announced the release of its “Blog It” application for Facebook, which allows you write a post within Facebook and then broadcast it to up to ten different blog and mini-blog services. And the more that I think about it, this just seems a bit like backwards thinking. If we lived in an era without RSS or social aggregators like FriendFeed, then I could see how this would come in handy. But there isn’t a need for new ways to post the same information across all kinds of similar services – there’s a need to consolidate all of this information in one place. Facebook does this to a large extent (despite being walled off), and with widgets most blogs can do this, as well.

Blog It would be very cool if it allowed you display all of your information on one page as well as update it all from one page, which would in essence “eliminate the middle man” of the various social media sites and make it extremely convenient and less time consuming for users to update and display their info. I can’t imagine the Twitters, YouTubes and WordPresses of the world would be too pleased with this service, but really, it’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?

If (traditional) media companies saw the writing on the wall…

Eric — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:59:32 +0000

Imagine if, 25 years ago, a time traveler from the present day appeared to newspaper, television and radio executives to outline the media landscape in 2008. He’d tell them about how the Internet has dramatically increased the number of media outlets and how it’s enabled everyone to opine or present news via text, audio or video for virtually no cost at all. That it’s decimated the newspaper classified ad market with free, wide-reaching alternatives. That people no longer have to wait for the evening news or the next morning’s paper, but can follow along with up-to-the-minute updates of breaking events that are pushed directly to them, wherever they are in the world.

Executives would grumble. After all, good reporting costs money. The infrastructure that supports the production and distribution of news, be it print, radio or television, is extremely expensive – It’ll be impossible to compete when everyone is a reporter and can instantly broadcast or publish around the world. Plus, there’s only so much ad money to go around – if advertisers flock to the little guy, that’s fewer ad dollars for the big companies! Not to mention the loss of revenue that comes in from the “for sale” and “want” ads!

The time traveler, if he were savvy, would agree, but with a few caveats. While it’s true that things will change a great deal in the next quarter-decade, he’d say, you’re missing the big picture. Wouldn’t you want your content distributed instantly and inexpensively, all over the world? (I can travel to Europe and still read live updates of baseball games at the Web page of my hometown newspaper.) Despite the new influx of opinion leaders and “new” media personalities, don’t people still need and crave local news? (All news is local news, after all.) Won’t new means of content distribution provide new ways to deliver advertising? (There’s a reason Google wants in on the mobile phone market, and it’s not to sell handsets.)

Finally, don’t you realize that quality reporting will always cost time and money, something usually out of the reach of everyone but news organizations that can afford it? (People can only have an opinion about the news if there’s news to opine on.)

After leaving executives with those thoughts, when the time traveler returned to the present day, would anything have changed? Could the big media companies have figured out how to leverage all of these opportunities, or would we continue to hear stories about major media outlets, from those with national reach to those in major local markets laying off personalities because of the rise of the Internet and social media?

I wonder sometimes.