I have been skeptical of the trading value of journalists, whose prices have been bid up, “Journalists” are the new no-money-down mortgages:
A whole lot of money is chasing the new cool kids, the newly name-branded “journalists” like Ezra Klein and Glenn Greenwald, who bring their friends along with them to the bottomless internet money pits….I suppose the founder of First Look Media, who also was the founder of eBay, doesn’t much care if he loses tens of millions of dollar to buy ego-journalists, but what about the others. How will traditional media deal with the raising of everyone’s boat from the combination of ego-journalism and superlative-mania?The bidding up of mostly mediocre journalism has to end badly.Bubble always do end badly. And no one expects it.
Ezra Klein’s Vox.com is off to a rocky start, with a fair amount of mockery all around. It remains to be seen if people read Ezra Klein because he was at WaPo, or read WaPo because Ezra Klein was there. I’m betting on the former.
The Intercept, starring Glenn Greewald, is off to a less than spectacular start. After a handful of posts, which did not impress me and mostly regurgitated what we already knew, it has gone silent, leading to this explanation from former Gawker editor and now Intercept editor John Cook:
Hello. My name is John Cook, and as of three weeks ago I became the editor-in-chief of The Intercept. Since then, we haven’t published much material on the site, and that’s been on purpose. I’d like to take a moment to catch interested readers up on where we are and what you can expect from us over the coming weeks and months….Those things still have not been worked out, and over the past three weeks I have begun the process of resolving them in collaboration with the remarkably talented team that has already been assembled here. Until we have completed the work of getting staffed up and conceptually prepared for the launch of a full-bore news operation that will be producing a steady stream of shit-kicking stories, The Intercept will be narrowly focusing on one thing and one thing only: Reporting out stories from the NSA archive as quickly and responsibly as is practicable. We will do so at a tempo that suits the material. When we are prepared to publish those stories, we will publish them. When we are not, we will be silent for a time, unless Glenn Greenwald has some blogging he wants to do, because no one can stop Glenn Greenwald from blogging.
In other words, The Intercept was not ready but was launched anyway. And the only thing it has going for it now are more Snowden leaks.
There is so much money behing The Intercept, that I’m not betting against it. But once the Snowden leaks dry up and/or grow tiresome to readers (if they haven’t already), what then?
Looks like a bubble in the early stages of bursting.
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