Howard Stern is leaving K-Rock for satellite radio, where fart jokes and midget strippers will live on. Go Howard. To fill that all important frat boy market, K-Rock has been looking for replacements. Instead of just one guy, they are going for the team approach. David Lee Roth (nice hairplugs, dude) and Adam Carolla have signed on.
The team approach is winning in the blogosphere,too. Not only do we have Huffington Post and TPM Cafe, but two more group blogs are making their debut.
Dan Drezner tell us that he’s getting swallowed up Pajamas Media. And The Plank is a group blog from the New Republic that is off to good start by not promising much.
Good-bye to the solo project. There is solidarity in numbers.
Yeah, I don’t know what to think about all this. On the one hand, I often stand back in awe of some of the group blogs and realize that there is no way to compete. They can read and digest and post at speeds that no one person could match (except maybe Glenn Reynolds). They can take a day off or even a week off and their readership doesn’t evaporate. They probably even have time to answer comments and e-mail. They can pool resources for fancy layouts. By combining readerships, they can assemble the numbers necessary to rake in the big advertising bucks.
On the other hand, the end result isn’t always so great. I check out TPM for only maybe one or two guys. Now that Podhoretz has stopped posting at The Corner, I probably won’t lurk there anymore. There’s nobody in the Pajama group that I’ll read other than Dan. There will always be one or two people doing the heavy lifting in these group projects.
I also worry about diluting personality in these group efforts. No one person’s quirks and charms dominate, instead you get a boring blend. You also lose one of the fun parts about blogging — the jerry rigged blog full of cable accessy bloopers and genius moments.
Group blogs, like group radio, are safe, but boring. There’s no replacing Howard.
Apt. 11d 
I think this is a trend that may eventually be countered a bit once RSS (or Atom or whatever) is finally easy enough to be used by everybody.
This has been said before, but RSS readers don’t care so much about regular updates from every single blog. All of their regular reads become like e-mail or one huge custom-made group blog, and the signal-to-noise ratio of each individual feed becomes more important than its update frequency.
Of course, that wasn’t the only advantage of group blogging, but it’s a big one.
LikeLike
It will be interesting to see if Stern can survive the move to satellite; the likelihood is a bit less now than it was a few months ago. Ever since he turned his show into an hours-long infomercial for his move to satellite, his ratings have apparently dropped by one-third here in D.C. and by around 15 percent in New York. When you can find crass, Stern-like media everywhere you turn these days–on cable, radio, the Internet, you name it–I don’t know that his listeners are quite as desperate for him as he perhaps thought they were. But it’s early yet…
LikeLike
Fantastic post.
I’m not sure about this point, though:
“No one person’s quirks and charms dominate, instead you get a boring blend.”
My own experience reading Big Brass Blog is different: there were consistently great posts turned out week after week, some of which were quite poetic. And I got to know different posters and their different styles and quirks, as you put it. It was never boring or even approaching bland…
However, I did shed a tear when BagNewsNotes said he’d be posting material over at Huffington Post; it seemed to me to be a step towards abandoning the main blog, although he probably has no intention of doing so. Still, how long until someone offers him a salary and he jumps ship? (all speculation, of course!)
I’ve posted some articles over at Media Girl, but I did that to support Media Girl (excellent site!) and (possibly) increase my readership. I’m not sure I achieved either but it was still fun to throw in your two cents’ worth on a group blog. 🙂 And perhaps that’s why BagNewsNotes did the same.
As you can see, I’m conflicted. 😉
LikeLike
Sorry – I got excited in posting and didn’t really address your idea of one voice dominating, and if that is preferable. *sigh* Post in haste, repend in leisure…
LikeLike
Does Howard Stern have a blog? I suppose if one spends a considerable amount of time in a car (or whatever/wherever). Then yes Howard, via radio can at least be fun/amusing/entertaining.
However some of us, never listen to radio, ever. When it stopped being about music, we stopped listening. Though we still spin platters when the mood strikes.
The blogosphere may evolve into an unknown, something we might not even recognoize today. Or, it just may grow into something very large, but also just plain, possibly even stagnant. It’s still new, it’s still novel, it’s still growing. Shucks, it’s still even fun.
Elmo
LikeLike