Bloggasm

UPDATED BELOW

After reading this absolutely brilliant takedown of “new media guru” Jeff Jarvis, I felt myself asking this question: What has Jeff Jarvis ever done to earn his “new media guru” street cred?

Kevin Rose went out and did. Craig Newmark went out and did. Nick Denton went out and did. Larry Page and Sergey Brin went out and did. Michael Arrington went out and did. These folks I just listed came up with ideas, invested in them, and then went on to flourish and profit in new media.

Jarvis? The only appeal that he seems to offer is the fact that he’s an old media dude who “saw the light.” He’s perpetually in “I told you so” mode and yet very rarely comes up with real results. He speaks in vague truisms while arrogantly declaring the Truth and frothing spittle at the old media “curmudgeons.” His ideas are vague and unoriginal.

He is the classic example of “those who can’t do, teach.”

My favorite quote from the Slate smackdown:

It’s an example of his blind allegiance to the wisdom of the consumer, to quantity over quality and expertise. Everything else is elitism. He’s the Sarah Palin of gurus. The crowd is always right.

Maybe the old media types at the New York Times and AP are impressed by his tirades, but forgive me if I can’t differentiate his writing from the hyperbolic anti-MSM rhetoric of your average Digg commenter.

UPDATE: Jarvis responds in my comments section, and I respond to him.

Two related pieces of bad news:

Dozens Laid Off At CondeNet

Conde Nast has laid off dozens of people today from CondeNet, the company’s internet division. We hear from one source that 60 people were let go this morning, most in tech, some in marketing. We also hear that an additional 20 staffers were fired from “Conde Connect,” the company’s internal intranet division. Conde itself hasn’t released specific numbers, but these are part of the 5% across-the-board cuts the company ordered two weeks ago.

And:

Digital dealmaker and a dozen others out at Wired:

A quarter of the 50-something employees in Wired.com’s San Francisco newsroom are gone, a source tells us — and with them, the bubbly delusion that Wired would not just report on the transformation of media by technology, but be a part of the revolution as well. The cuts hit Wired’s tech team heavily, though some writers and editors also got pink slips. (CNET reports that 3 out of 28 editorial staffers are gone, but a Wired insider says that the actual number of edit jobs cut is at least six.)

I’ve been pretty apathetic about most the announced cuts in the journalism industry, but it sucks when a company you admire has to go through it. Plus I guess many of us probably hoped that Wired was a publication that had “figured it out” and may lead the way to journalism’s salvation.

It must be incredibly difficult to write a magazine profile about a guy who writes for arguably the best and most prestigious magazine in the country. Jason Zengerle does a pretty good job.

YouTube Contest Challenges Users To Make A ‘Good’ Video

Palin gives me a shout-out:

First example: The More Things Change… — The post heavily quotes from Huffington Post without linking us to the actual article.

Second example: You Know What this Post-Election Landscape Needs? More Nate Silver — The post heavily quotes from the New York Times but doesn’t link to the article.

This is a trend I’ve seen more and more. Either burying links at the bottom of posts that merely summarize the article being linked to, or just throwing the links out the window all together. With the flurry of all the “death of the blogosphere” posts going around lately, it’s hard to look at these examples and not fear that the democratic collaborative feel of the blogosphere is collapsing as bloggers try to rope in more pageviews.