The descent of blogger’s: Convergence or Divergence


Jesus! vs Darwin!
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Reading one of my favourite blogger’s, Julian Cole prompted me to run to my mini library (A Shelf) and reread a chapter in one of my favourite books ‘Focus’ by Al Ries. The chapter is titled ‘The Driving Force of Division’.

In his Julian’s blog, my good blogging buddy, all round great guy and brilliant talent recently mentioned the big ‘C’ word in a post – Convergence.

Julian said “at the moment we are going through a phase of a converging of traditional marketing journalism meeting the marketing blogging community.”

Call me pedantic, but I slightly disagree with Julian’s assessment. Rather than a convergence, I see what’s happening within the blogging world as more of a Darwinist evolutionary divergence. Have I lost you yet?

As a species, Journalists are really going through a massive evolutionary crisis with their traditional source of revenue, the printed newspaper, struggling to compete with cheaper and quicker online new sources.

In my view, journalists that are old or unable to adapt will just perish, leaving the next generation journalist much stronger and more able to adaptable to the new competitive environment. Just look at Arianna Huffington with her Huffington Post.

On the other hand, marketing blogger’s is a new species of mainly aggressive commentators or experts with strong opinions. As new a species, we are still trying to figure out and adapt to our new environment and to our own needs.

Some blogger’s will flourish contributing to publications, some blogger’s will become global marketing celebrities, some blogger’s will become renowned for their expertise in a particular field of marketing and some blogger’s will just fade away.

But, to succeed as either a journalist or a renowned marketing blogger, I believe you must focus on one or the other. In other words, you have to pick a niche market.

I think I just proved Darwin was a marketer.

But, I would love to here your views on this…

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Posted under Marketing Newcastle   | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “The descent of blogger’s: Convergence or Divergence”

  1. Tim Burrowes - mumbrella Says:
    January 26th, 2009 at 2:39 pm

    Hi Gordon,
    Let’s not mix up journalists and proprietors/ publishers.
    For journalists, print may have been a good source of wages, via the advertisisng and circulation revenue earned by their proprietors. But by the same token, the cost of printing and distribution was what kept many journalists working for proprietors rather than doing their own thing.
    What we may see now is a generation of journalists coming through who have a far lower barrier to entry to being in control of their own destiny, and to eventually monetise whatever it is they do.
    I hope so, anyway.
    Cheers, Tim – mumbrella

  2. Craig Wilson Says:
    January 27th, 2009 at 7:48 am

    While I also enjoy pieces of Ries’s wisdom, I tend to agree that there is a convergence happening as the lines start to blur between journalism and blogging.
    Broadsheets now have online real estate that contain “blogs” by some of their journalists and guests “bloggers”, while other journalists have left the fold (pun in intended) to commence their own online publications. Tim (above) is a great example. Huff Post is a convergence between blogging and journalism too.
    It must be right, because I used the C word in my very recent wrap and recommendation of Mumbrella on Media Hunter. http://tinyurl.com/cpkskf and we bloggers are always right…aren’t we?

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