Calacanis: Celeb Blogs to Top Most Others Within Two Years

Jason McCabe Calacanis is a veteran of the online and media worlds. In the late 1990’s he created the Silicon Alley Reporter, which quickly grew into a must-read. When the Internet industry consolidated he changed the online publication’s name to Venture Reporter and eventually sold it to Wicks Business Information, and began his next adventure – the Weblogs, Inc. Network, co-founded last fall with longtime friend Brian Alvey.

Weblogs, Inc. (WIN) is rolling out dozens of trade blogs across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product. The company’s properties include the popular Engadget, The RSS Weblog, Marc Cuban’s Blog Maverick, The Nanopublishing Weblog and high-profile conference Weblogs.

Micro Persuasion caught up with Calacanis recently via email for a quick interview to understand more about his company’s business model and what impact for-profit blogs might have on the PR community.

MP: Jason, on your site it says that Weblogs, Inc. is dedicated to creating trade blogs across niche industries and that these will eventually form a new layer on top of traditional business-to-business media. That sure sounds like Jupitermedia and Alan Meckler, a onetime client of mine and a friend of yours! Why does the business-to-business media world need such a layer and how does WIN fill that void?

CALACANIS: Alan is a friend, yes.

Alan, however is doing traditional journalism--we are doing blogs which are *not* journalism.

Also, Alan is doing tech only... we are doing all trade.

So, we're not more like Internet.com/Jupiter Media than we are like Ziff Davis or CNET--in other words not at all!

MP: Why do you feel traditional journalism- a field you were part of for many years - is broken?

CALACANIS: I think it is broken for two main reasons:

1. Consolidation.

2. Lack of transparency.

These two factors are causing the public to mistrust traditional journalist and media outlets so much that users are looking for source material and alternate voices.

In some ways the readers are becoming their own journalist.

MP: Is it difficult for your bloggers to get press credentials for the big events they blog?

Not at all.

We get asked to come.

Also, I know most of the folks running these shows so I make calls on behalf of them to the top people at these shows and discuss the value of us covering the event.

MP: WIN is the company behind Mark Cuban's popular Weblog. What is the future of celebrity blogging?

CALACANIS: The future of blogs is that celebrity/established bloggers will be 90-95% of the top 100 blogs in two years. Anyone who is on the list of top bloggers today should be prepared to get knocked down to the 200-500 slots when established players join the party.

That being said, being neck and neck with very established players is a very big deal.

MP: How will Weblogs Inc. and, all blogs for that matter, make money?

CALACANIS: Same way all publications and media outlets do...

1) Advertising

2) Subscriptions

3) Cross media products/licensing (i.e. A Boingboing.net print magazine, an Engadget.com TV show, a Buzzmachine Radio Show,. etc).

MP: OK, let's say traditional journalism is indeed broken. Does that mean traditional PR is broken too? Does the PR community yet grasp the impact of participatory journalism and blogs?

CALACANIS: I think PR people get blogs... PR people are like pornographers, they grok the technology early on because they can profit from it. Now, I'm not saying PR people are pornographers. :-)

MP: You have said that 80% of the people you meet do not know what blogs are. What will it take for blogs to go more mainstream? If no one knows about them now, why are they important?

CALACANIS: I would up that number to 95%. It is shocking.

My goal is to make Weblogs a mainstream.... I think Blogmaverick.com has educated more people as to what a blog is than anything that has happened to date. Blogmaverick.com is talked about on ESPN TV!

MP: What suggestions can you offer PR pros interested in either getting positive "coverage" from a Weblog or are interested in launching their own blogs?

CALACANIS: Nothing, except be supportive when bloggers have questions and maybe participate in the comments section of blogs.

Blogs in some ways are a problem for the PR industry because they are so transparent. PR people traffic in image, not reality. Blogs are reality, so PR people are going to need to "keep it real," as opposed to playing stupid games like giving exclusives, etc.

MP: What do the more popular bloggers feel about PR people?

CALACANIS: They hate them.... just like traditional journalists.

MP: What is your vision of the future of Weblogs and participatory journalism and the relationship between nanopublishing and the mainstream press?

CALACANIS: The mainstream press is going to take up blogging in many cases, and in others they will be referencing blogs on a regular basis. We've seen this story already... Matt Drudge was the one of the early bloggers (he hates to be called a blogger, but he's a blogger--get over it Matt).

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He recommends:

1) Researching the most relevant blogs

2) Respecting the blogger

3) Rolling your own blogs

4) Regularly reviewing your blog relations program

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Blogs Don't Challenge the Media Establishment, They Enhance It

ClickZ today features a provocative column by Vin Crosbie on how mainstream media outlets don't realize how technology has eroded many of the barriers that prevent new competition.

He highlights PaidContent.org, DPReview.com and others as upstart competitors to the big media conglomerates. Crosbie writes:

Traditional publishers and broadcasters should worry about these efforts. Entry barriers will continue to fall as new media technology evolves. New competition will further decrease the market price consumers will pay for content.

While not concluding this directly, Crosbie seems to indicate that mainstream media outlets will see their margins squeezed as nanopublishing gains steam. The one thing I think he overlooks is the power of media brands. For example, will you ever stop reading AdAge, PR Week, The Holmes Report or O'Dwyer's in favor of Micro Persuasion, PR Opinions or the Media Drop? In a word, no.

What will happen is that eventually many of us will settle in on a few favorite blogs to read regularly. We will rely on these Weblogs to aggregate - and provide perspective - on the relevant news we need and want to know on a particular micro-niche subject. So, like Robert Scoble has already said, Weblogs are not a threat to mainstream media. Rather, they will serve as important portals to higher-value content.

In other words, nanopublishing will make big media outlets more relevant by helping readers/viewers focus on what's most important to them.