Noah Brier dot Com

Highly Variable Product

Felix Salmon has a good rundown on how Elizabeth Spiers has succeeded at the New York Observer. I thought his summation of online content was especially interesting (and somewhat sad):

And so, in the proud tradition of good blogs everywhere, readers are left with a highly variable product. The great is rare; the dull quite common. But — and this is the genius of the online format — that doesn’t matter, not any more, and certainly not half as much as it used to. When you’re working online, more is more. If you have the cojones to throw up everything, more or less regardless of quality, you’ll be rewarded for it — even the bad posts get some traffic, and it’s impossible ex ante to know which posts are going to end up getting massive pageviews. The less you worry about quality control at the low end, the opportunities you get to print stories which will be shared or searched for or just hit some kind of nerve.

Interesting piece from Mediaite on Buzzfeed Politics: “Buzzfeed’s coverage of the Presidential race is deliberately non-traditional, and likely wouldn’t work as well with an issue that couldn’t presume the same baseline of knowledge from its audience. Nor will it take long for other outlets to mimic what they’re doing; campaign coverage moves and evolves quickly. But Buzzfeed has a head start – smart reporters, savvy infrastructure.” I haven’t spent too much time there yet, but the concept certainly sounds different.

What BuzzFeed’s New Politics Team Is Doing Right | Mediaite