Mainstream media is weighing in worldwide on the Rocketboom bust, but the majority of dead-tree journos don’t get it or they rehash what bloggers have been saying all week. strong>Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune Hypertext blog says:
“Congdon is reportedly already fielding job offers. She’ll surely land a good gig hosting somebody else’s version of an Internet news show and be able to move to L.A. if she wants to. But it’s hard to imagine it having staying power unless her new executive producers persuade her to stop with all the shameless mugging for the camera.”
Dear Steve, the reason 300,000 people a day watched Rocketboom was because it didn’t pretend to be objective. People who admit that they have opinions are more believable than those who pretend they don’t. That goes a long way toward explaining the growth of social media.
And Felicia Lee at the NY Times correctly calls the Rocketboom rift a cyberspace soap opera, but adds absolutely no new details to the news bloggers have been reporting all week.
Lots of people have been busy editing the Wikipedia entries on Rocketboom and Amanda Congdon and there are now more than 10,300 posts tagged rocketboom at Technorati
Enough already. Let us know when Amanda gets a job!
Rocketboom returns with an interim host on Monday, and Dave Winer thinks it’s Amber Dawn MacArthur, although he doesn’t cite a source. Hey Dave, that’s “totally shoddy” reporting. Don’tcha think. :>)
Goes to show that original reporting and boring rehashing go both ways now between blogs and mainstream media. I guess the line between the two is getting more and more blurry all the time – it was always a more conceptual than literal line anyway.
You have a great knack for picking the lessons out of the stories (and the stories about the stories). Thanks!