In the same piece about Facebook and wokeness that I wrote about earlier, Matt Yglesias talks about the initial vision of Vox:
One of the things that a lot of us old-time blogger types are good at is writing a lot of words across a broad range of subjects....And we thought this was scalable — that it would be relatively easy to hire a lot more people and train them based on this vision and our methods. This was basically wrong.
I couldn't help but laugh about this. Consider the kind of person who makes an ideal blogger of the kind Matt describes:
- Must be as obsessed about writing all the time as some people are about videogaming.
- Must be very widely read and have pretty good judgment about how much they know.
- Must be interested in just about everything.
- Since this is journalism we're talking about, must be willing to work for relatively low wages.
lollollollollollollollol. How many people on the planet have weirdo brains like this? And of the ones who do, how many want to do something inherently kind of silly (writing half a dozen shortish takes each day on whatever's going on right now)? And of the ones still left, how many are there who can't make twice as much doing something else?
And it gets worse. Suppose you could find 20 or 30 people like this and hire them. How many will last? The kind of person who can do what Matt describes is quite likely not the kind of person who wants to be a faceless member of a big team. They like the idea of doing it on their own and getting credit for it. You'd lose half your staff in the first year and be in a constant, fruitless, hiring frenzy trying to find ever more weirdos. It is an unsquarable circle.
Hmm, weren't Yglesias and Kline ousted from the publication they founded because they didn't foster a woke enough atmosphere for their media reviewer transwoman?
Funny you mention Kline; I think of those two as being representative of the alternative pablum crowd.
Hilariously, Matt himself doesnt pass all of that - he is massively flawed on 'pretty good judgement on what they know'
Funniest thing at the beginning of news/politics blogging 20 years ago was at dailykos where they all used silly pseudonyms that, I suppose, was to make the whole thing seem more subversive. I started to remark about it there, almost from the start, on the point Drum makes here: don't they want to start building (real) names for themselves? My concern was how would the good ones be promoted to traditional outlets when their dumb aliases made it seem like they just wanted to spout off without signing their (real) names? And there were / are a lot of very good analytical bloggers making valuable contributions to the discourse from the very beginning. It took over ten years before it began to change at a lot of the old blogs (now mostly defunct).
Silly pseudonyms? You're saying this on "calpundit"?
Programmers frequently use embedded capital letters to make their data names and procedure names understandable to other programmers who have to read the code. For example, I use DayOfWeek instead of dayofweek, even though the software ignores the case of the letters.
IMO "CalPundit" is not silly; it's an easy to read and easy to understand moniker.
IIRC Drum's real name has always been attached to the names of the blogs he's used for his posts.
How odd. The whole reason Josh Marshall started TPM and later other blogs arose was because the traditional outlets were fatuous idiots. Getting into the Serious Journalism Club was never a goal and there was enough to make a living for the good ones.
I see that WaMo has eliminated Political Animal (its longtime in house blog) now, e.g. Not a stand-alone blog, but a real one that included Drum here, of course, and Steve Benen et. al.
Already lost down the memory hole.
"How many people on the planet have weirdo brains like this? And of the ones who do, how many want to do something inherently kind of silly (writing half a dozen shortish takes each day on whatever's going on right now)?"
I think maybe Kevin, who's pretty good with numbers, has fallen on his own sword here. Suppose one tenth of one percent of adults have the talent to do it. (I.e., the weirdo brains.) And suppose only one percent of those have the inclination to do something so silly. (I.e., the warped motivation.)
That's one in a hundred thousand with the talent and the inclination. In the USA there are about 200 million adults. So there might be about 2,000 adults with the talent and the slightly warped motivation to be capable bloggers.
But of those 2,000 people, how many of them would turn their nose up at much more remunerative pursuits with their own peculiar awards as opposed to soldiering on as a lone crusading blogger? Numbers please.
Matt Yglesias is a weird and bad person who lives in a completely different reality from anyone else and should almost always just shut up in any given situation.
They could hire reference librarians. They tend to constantly read in a wide range of areas. They are also used to low wages.
But they tend to be less forcefully opinionated (the job requires hiding your opinions on research topics) and typically aren't interested in becoming well-known as commentators, so you'd want to have pseudonyms similar to the columnists in The Economist.
I believe what you're describing is a twice-exceptional ADHD brain. Money is not a motivator; novelty and brevity are especially attractive drivers.
Internet adventure of a cat named Kevin,
https://old.reddit.com/r/OneOrangeBraincell/comments/zfk9g5/kevin_has_been_sitting_and_watching_a_game/
People have already riffed on this, but:
Wince. No -- trust me on this, Matt -- you're not good at writing a lot of words across a broad range of subjects. Which many people have told you over the years. Repeatedly. I'd say that pronouncing yourself the sole judge of whether or not you know as much as you think you do would be a whopping tell to anyone who had the remotest bit of self-awareness; then again, how many malignant narcissits turn themselves in for treatement?