Since I'm clearly not part of the Business Tribe™, I have been amusing myself for the past couple of days getting acquainted with Busi-Speak™ and the Business Bloggers™. It's a whole new world. One of the commenters in my last post referred to Penelope Trunk. Never heard of her. Trunk claims to have 30,000 subscribers, but I don't know how that translates into actual readership.
Her post of the week is on whether there can be conflicts of interest and blogging. She writes,
who are putting themselves on the line. That rule is for old media,
where writers were putting only the brand of the newspaper on the line.
In old media most journalists were no-names, writing under big
(newspaper) names. So if they wrote something moronic, so that they
could increase the value of a stock they held, or, maybe, get more oral
sex, they would put only the newspaper brand at risk. Not their own.
Which means that the arcane conflict of interest rules are to
protect the newspaper, not the readers. And this, by the way, is why
newspapers are going down: because they are more about themselves, and
their hierarchies, and rules and structures, than they are about what
their readers want. Readers should not care about the business dealings
of the writers or their publishers. Readers just want good content.
Totally disagree, but it's an interesting post. Read the whole thing.
