Despite the holiday, we've gotten lots of response to yesterday's Cuban post.
A reader asks:
Your business model seems to be very similar to Weblogs, Inc., a company in which Mark Cuban has recently invested. I was wondering how your concept differed and how do you feel about Weblogs, Inc.
I can see some at-a-glance similarities, but the models are very different.
- They are primarily B-to-B; we're consumer.
- They appear to be mostly about aggregation. We're about original reporting, in a very narrow "geographic vertical," but believe that by aggregating content from outside that vertical (national/international news), we can compete with the "everything-to-everyone" incumbent dailies.
- They're a new-model business in a single medium. We're a hybrid across many mediums, including print.
- Financially, they are a low-risk/low-reward model; we're high-risk/high-reward.
(As a side note, slugging through the mail/comments from some of the BlogMaverick readers is making me rethink our discarded slogan: Blogging with the grammar, spelling and punctuation of journalism.)
The Fat Guy adds:
BlogMaverick is an interesting experiment, and I think it's going to stand as a monument to "controlling the story" at some point in the future. Didn't Cuban start it as a way to avoid talking to reporters so he wouldn't be quoted out of context? Well, this way, he only answers questions he wants to answer, and he gets to answer them on his own schedule (and cross-market that horrid teevee show.) Which means, basically, that I don't trust his reporting of "facts" any more than I trust Belo or ESPN. Cuban even types it out loud: There were other questions I asked and got answered that I cant list here. Gee willikers, why not?
More to the point: reporting becomes harder to do as control is exerted. ESPN's control of the tape of the miked ref, NBA's control of the game tape, attendance counts controlled by individual teams (we KNOW that this gets gamed), etc. Right now, this control aspect is (IMHO) rampant in sports. I expect it to move that way faster in bidness. Governmental agencies have a more difficult time of this, but institutionalized bureaacricies staffed by lifetime employees are getting better and better at controlling their message. How does J2.0 attack these problems?...
That's a good question, one that I think we'll continue to wrestle with over time. My kneejerk answer is that we'll have an edge, partly because we've so narrowed our beat that we'll have the resources to really dig locally (rather than funding national bureaus, globetrotting correspondents and local reporters reviewing Broadway shows). I think the main advantage is that in covering previously neglected hyper-local topics, at least in the early days, we're going to be covering folks who've been lonely for a long time. That means that they're probably eager to join the conversation. And failing that, they don't have a lot of practice in stonewalling the media.
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