On comms design

communication is essential to business making and it involves more than the ability to name your product, write a tag line or a press release. It's an intricate, rational and scalable effort and, let's face it, not anyone can do it.

9/22/2008

Blogging in danger

Romania has lot of bloggers, a few good ones and a handful of bloggers who piss a lot of people off.

One of them recently pissed off a huge media conglomerate by making a silly - although distasteful - joke, which the media conglomerate itself aired thus creating a huge media scandal. The immediate result of this is that the media group is now on a focused rampage against blogging of all sorts, pushing almost all staff to speak out against blogging. I have seen this in several shows, read it in some editorials.

I am concerned for one reason: the power of mass media far outstrips that of the blogosphere and it is a losing battle. From this confrontation, the few will come out branded as criminals, losers and anti-social dangers. But the few include more than that handful of bloggers who piss everyone off. The few include people who may add substantially to knowledge and thought produced locally.

I think someone, maybe within the media conglomerate, should allow the blogosphere to redeem itself by giving it the chance to respond. Somehow, this strikes me as very similar to branding Romania: we have some good stuff but those who speak about us insist on pointing out the orphans and gypsies. So, how do we go about giving the rest a chance?
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4 comments:

Vivi said...

As long as they spell "blogosphere" correctly, I'd say there is no such thing as bad publicity, is it?

And if you think of the recent past where bloggers were called wankers, people without real jobs, good for nothing punks, it kind of reminds me of the early ages of the Internet when everybody that was spending time online was supposed to be a highschool kid with no money and looking to chat on IRC. :-)

So it's probably not a huge departure from that era, it's all water under the bridge.

9/23/2008
Oxygen said...

They may call bloggers whatever they want. It's up to people to make their own impression and not listen to whatever they are told.

It may have been a bad joke, but it was their incompetence that put in on air...

9/23/2008
Bogdana Butnar said...

I understand but, in principle, I disagree with both of you, and with Zoso. This Ghandi attitude may not be the solution in a world where niche is not really given a chance. I think that there is no point in bloggers behaving like we are a micro community and we really do not need to be heard or liked. I think there is real value in blogging and it should be recognized as such for more people to take advantage of it. And more people means mass media...so mass media should be made to reconsider its relationship with the blogosphere. :-)

9/24/2008
Anonymous said...

I think this case should actually put the media in the spotlight. The joke was malicious, he clearly made a mistake.
But the worst mistake of all is for a TV station to act upon it without checking it out. You can't just take info from the internet and comment it without knowing more details and without hearing the other part's story.

9/25/2008

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