Thursday March 28, 2019; 4:34 PM EDT
This time I hope the press who cover new media will ask serious questions instead of echoing the hype. I will write more about it myself, I assume. I've been working on my move to the country for the last 24 hours so I've only had time to tweet about this.#- In this post I'll link to the tweets and to the posts I wrote during the maximum hype over The Correspondent. I didn't care where their office was. I did object to them claiming to be revolutionary, because I didn't see any evidence of that. I come from the tech industry which indulged in this kind of hype many many times, and fortunes were made, a lot more than $2.7 million, over less than what The Correspondent had. I had high hopes for them, and in the end when I saw the plan I saw that they either didn't understand, or they punted and decided to do something pretty normal, but to hype it as if it were remarkable. #
- Anyway, here are some of today's on-topic tweets#
- 1:28AM: It wasn't a movement.#
- 8:21AM: I asked tough questions.#
- 12:19PM: It's not a PR disaster, it's worse.#
- 12:32PM: The baby squirrel pitch.#
- And some of the previous posts#
- December 10: Another academic journalist endorsed TheC, plus comments on overhyped journalism startups. #
- December 11: Followup on The Correspondent. I asked questions of the company and got some answers. Some of which may be news to pundits opining about TheC.#
- December 12: I emailed with Baratunde.#
- December 13: I object to calling a for-profit venture a movement. #
- December 27: What it means that TheC has to co-exist with the deep-pockets of Medium, which takes a much more courageous view of reader than TheC does (and imho if they don't match them, what chance do they have).#
- Finally just so you know where I'm coming from#
- Last summer I wrote a piece entitled How journalism is like the Mets. Especially appropriate since today is opening day, and the Mets won, with hits by a former Yankee if you can believe that. #
- Journalism has yet to win the World Series in the new world. The people who write about journalism today don't have a feel for what's possible. They're roaming around in the dark looking for inspiration, but they don't seem to know what questions to ask.#
- The Correspondent was a softball. Easy to figure out. Yet they all took the easy way out and just repurposed the hype. I believe they believed it. But they have to toughen up if they want to make it to the championship series. #