You gotta love Jeff Jarvis. No one - and I do mean no one - has imbibed more of the blogger's Kool-Aid than the man with the scraggly beard, the relentlessly centrist, every-waking-though-a-post media maven who has become a one-man XML empire unto himself.
Empire indeed. Because seemingly, and surprisingly, Jeff Jarvis has recently embraced the old media rules - the "I write, you read, and you'd better like it" rules of the old media world he pretends to despise. Just look at the site, folks. BuzzMachine has become the online equivalent of what Ed Koch used to say about middle class neighborhoods in New York resisting development: it's last one in, shut the door.
In a matter of months, the Jarvis site has morphed from a sloppy, loose, dog-eared, open-sourced mess of a brilliant conversation into a neat, tidy and heavily-guarded little money-maker.
Exhibit one: trackbacks are gone. Jeff got his; the hell with the thousands of bloggers just getting started who might want the lone click-through a trackback provides.
Exhibit two: the blogrolls are gone. See exhibit one.
Exhibit three: the MSNBC screen capture. Yup, citizen's media spoken here.
Exhibit four: the tagroll. It's obsessive, and it represents only one man's organization of the information on the site. Jeff's.
Now, I'm not one to call out another blogger just for the hell of it. But Jarvis is more than your average blogger: he's one of a handful of leaders of what purports to be a movement, a reformation of the "failed" world of mainstream American media, particularly journalism. Hell, Jeff's obsession and example helped get many of us into blogging. So why is Jeff Jarvis essentially closing up shop?
By the standards of the average Joe's blog, everything about BuzzMachine is just peachy - it's a fine blog, well-written, and certainly a must-read for media types (I'm on the feed every day).
What grates, however, is rampant blog triumphalism competing with entrenched blog triumphalist. Jeff's site used to be a great community; now it's just Jeff's great site.
I wonder if he just got sick of Kool-Aid?
UPDATE: Well, Jeff is royally pissed. Took it personally. I'm sorry for that (and for claiming incorrectly that BuzzMachine had removed trackbacks; didn't have 'em - but should). Though I do cop to the charge of snarkiness, this was not a personal attack - just a criticism of, well, a major media critic.
My tone may have been better, however: I may have focused on some little, stupid site details rather than the big picture. That is to say: I buried the lead. It's the blog triumphalism I resent, as I've said before; it's the idea of a very few media insiders that everything we do or say or invent is rife with "revolutionary" repercussions for society. The "we" vs. "them" - old media, new media - faux divide is grating in the extreme.
Luckily, Chervokas stepped up and actually made the argument I only hinted at with snark (seems we've worked this tag-team before) so I'll quote him here from comments, 'cos it's good stuff.
Does "citizen media," what we used to call, back in the day, "user generated content," represent a substantial challenge to the business structure of major media companies? Yes and no. A decade ago, when Tom and I launched @NY and began preaching that user generated content would change media forever, we (I don't me just Tom and I but the whole industry) believed that super narrow niche media and communities of interest would result in a new paradigm in advertising that would involve super premium pricing for highly targeted ad delivery, thereby changing media as an industry from a mass medium to a medium of the masses (I believe it was Tom who first coined that latter phrase). The medium of the masses has come to pass. The new financial paradigm has not. Instead the companies that make money from advertising on blogs and homemade websites, companies like Google, do so by aggregating mass audiences and charging the least premium kind of prices to be found in the ad business--direct marketing style prices based on response rates. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
Jeff (snarkily) dismissed Jason with a regal wave of his commenting hand, but Chervokas came back with more:
I really do think there's a self-perpetuating hype avalanche that occurs when media focuses on media; and the net result is the overstatement of the importance of stuff like blogs--the stuff we media pros are surrounded by but which the broader public experiences very differently. And I think Tom's criticism that you've fallen pray to the momentum of that avalanche is something you might at least consider, however snarkily he might have expressed it. It's like the Howard Dean effect. Young political reporters fell in love w/ Dean because the webcentric Meetup-driven nature of his campaign seemed novel and cool. As a result Dean got a lot of unskeptical feel-good press which gave the impression that he was the next big thing. But, as it turned out, when election time came, no one was there to pull a lever for him. The surging Dean campaign was a figment of the imagination of an unskeptical press dazzled by Internet cool. Maybe I'm a curmudgeon, maybe I'm a contrarian, but the more people tell me that something is cool, the more skeptical I am of the whole enterprise. That skepticism might have cost me money as an entrepreneur, but it always stood me in good stead as a journalist.
Read the full exchange in comments here; I hope Jeff posts a thoughtful response. He's a thoughtful guy. But my favorite comment in this little contretemps came from MediaCurmudgeon over at BM:
Jeff–You’re too sensitive and defensive. Don’t dignify the dope with a mention.
Who you calling "dope," curmudgeon?
