Good Back And Forth on The Personal Branding Efforts of the Mediatti
Good anecdotal evidence from Elizabeth in response to Will and Soup’s thoughts…
“From my experience, 27 percent of the people who work in media (and I’m using the Mediaite definition of media, which is pretty much “anyone who gets paid for typing, talking or figuring out how to fire people who type or talk”) are journalists in the truest sense, out to enlighten the public for common good, altruistic believers in the fourth estate and its power to invoke change. The other 73 percent are pretending to be that 27 percent and really just trying to promote their own personal brand.”
Will Leitch, The Real Reason You Should Hate The Media (And That Includes Us)
What Leitch is blissfully and conveniently ignoring is that sites like Gawker and Mediaite wouldn’t be successful if only those in media cared about media.
(via soupsoup)
Eh, I disagree, Soup. Gawker could have not covered media and been fine. Our first big traffic spikes were posts about Puma and Catherine Zeta Jones. Covering media gets you PR (because people who might cover you want to read about themselves) which is a plus, but it doesn’t really drive traffic.
Another metric: look at the views on Gawker for media-related items vs. everything else. Or ask Sheila McClear or Maggie Shnayerson why numbers were down on their posts. (They both covered media exclusively for Gawker.) It certainly wasn’t a quality issue.
Most people who don’t work in media don’t even recognize bylines, much less care about the insidery politics of media organizations.
Though I will say, I think Will’s 73 percent estimate is overblown thanks to unfortunate overexposure to people like that. *Most* people who work in media are in production jobs, are stringers, beauty assistants—or, godforbid, ad sales!— etc., who just do their jobs without much thought to journalism OR personal brand.
