03 | Business Models Are The Easy Part

November 13th, 2009 by bruno boutot
  • You are warned about everything you can’t do, topics you can’t touch, words you can’t use. Upon arrival, you are treated as a potential danger.
  • You have to agree that everything you write, every photo or video you post on the site will become forever the property of the media and you abandon any claim to it. Upon arrival, you are told that everything you contribute will be stolen.
  • You have to give a name, any name, but the media doesn’t give you a personal page with your identity and the memory of your contributions. You can comment one or 100 times, you can write important information or rubbish, you can help drive a conversation, but nobody will remember it, nobody will be able to find it again. You have no real identity, you can’t build a reputation. Nobody cares about who you are or what you can bring to the media.
  • You have a name and you may have a personal page with the memory of your contributions but you have no place to open a conversation, to contribute information, to propose a topic, to ask a question. The only thing you can do is to comment at the end of the golden words of real journalists. You can vent in your comments but you are not part of us and please keep your distance.
  • You are warned that there are moderators around and they will check your comments and maybe delete them but you are not told who these moderators are, you can’t talk to them: they don’t participate, they don’t comment, they just exercise their power. You are asked to contribute in a media where the police is anonymous and where moderators are not members of the community.
  • You are allowed to contribute in some places but not at others. Your input is accepted only when and where the “people who know” agree that you are allowed to leave something.  Otherwise, whether you have an important question to ask or a key information to add, you are obviously not qualified to add it in some place, as if you were unclean or totally uninteresting.
  • The rules of contribution are the same everywhere in the media because the owners don’t even know that topics and areas can be more interesting, more lively and become a more important part of the media when they have specific rules. So you have to suffer inane conversations because authors are not creating a tone and, worse, they don’t know that they could.
  • Journalists think that “Community” is the place where readers are corralled.
I don’t especially want to name names, take your pick, but you can pass through that filter the otherwise great nytimes.com or guardian.co.uk . #

#

1 Tweet

One Response to “03 | Business Models Are The Easy Part”

  1. brunoboutot Says:

    Business models are the easy part: http://bit.ly/3XJfyy

    This comment was originally posted on Twitter

Additional comments powered by BackType