Solid Thinking

From the Stuff.co.nz today: News Ltd lashes out at bloggers

News Limited’s chief executive, John Hartigan, has launched a broadside on bloggers and other online amateurs, arguing they are no substitute for professional journalists.

and

His most scathing attack was reserved for bloggers, who, he said, lacked resources and access to key decision-makers.

“In return for their free content, we pretty much get what we’ve paid for - something of such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance,” he said.

He said blogs often gave a platform for “radical sweeping statements unsubstantiated with evidence”.

and more

Mr Hartigan’s attack on blogs came a month after his company launched the news commentary website The Punch, which he said was reaching 200,000 users in its first month, compared to the target of 80,000. Next month Fairfax Media, the owner of The Sydney Morning Herald, will launch its own news commentary website, The National Times.

And also

Mr Hartigan indicated the company had plans to bypass the news aggregators. “We from this day own our own material and are going to go about getting it to the masses through our own sources without going through businesses like Google,” he said.

I personally find that ironic in a few ways:

• Claiming that blog content is “such limited intellectual value as to be barely discernible from massive ignorance” may be true in some cases, but it may not be true in a lot of other cases. In addition, mainstream journalisms have been known to have their ignorant and erroneous moments too.
• Slamming Internet bloggers is a bit rich coming from someone who is related to a news commentary website, which relies on user interactions and user-generated contents. These users are somewhat “bloggers” too. And we definitely know that insulting your users are not the best practice in online business.
• With his anti-Google stance, Mr Hartigan should ideally request Google to remove his websites from Google Index. It would be interesting to see how it may impact the websites’ traffic and growth. Seriously.

This sounds like a farmer cursing the cows in his farm for the smell rather than happily feeding them for the milk.

Comments?