There’s a world of difference between the editor-writer-publisher-printer-cook and bottlewasher struggling to put out a weekly community newspaper and the role of a financial commentator whose work may or may not interest people all over the planet; the former making perceptible impact on a known community, the latter having to rely on applied communications science to retain a necessary veneer of savoir faire, nobless oblige, charisma and – this being finance after all – global suspension of reader disbelief throughout the duration of narrative, factual or (present company excepted) fanciful.

In that regard, good blogging’s a bit like theatre: nobody really cares what measure of madness goes on behind the scenes at the actual venue of their delivery. The audience wants a nice show, and some sense of being in good hands. When and if the time is right to break the fourth wall, and timing is everything, only the strong and best-rehearsed performers survive.

I’m saying, let your editor, publisher, agent, manager, CPA or interns handle the dirty work. That’s what they’re for.

It probably isn’t going to take much to upstage Blodget for all time but, for the love of blog, please do it on merit rather than by devaluing the contest to one of dull metrics that nobody seriously gives a click about.

i posted on henry blog BI this:
i believe this sentence needs to read like this
“TBI has published 2,547 HEADLINES in March to date

got good ole henry attention with something like he is really getting peed on tonight?

I am curious how you guys get paid. In the name of transparency, it would be good governance if you disclose who else you write for, and how many words on any particular day, Rolfe does it on occasion.

A friend of mine resigned from a radio station two weeks ago and had to fire 7 employees before he left, he once told me that every click somehow brings in advertising money.

I much prefer a medium length opinion by Rolf, Bernd and Agnus, than these snippets and ego trips.

The quality of your work has nose-dived in the past month, maybe time to pay attention to the Canadian shareholder again ?

I completely understand your points and agree with many of them. I think long-form posts, though, fall more under the niche-content-that-you-charge-for model. Hence the fascinating ongoing business model debate between old media/new media and everywhere in between.

People have no problem putting up with ads because then the information is ‘free’ to them. Paying readers are paying for the value-add. I think in this particular instance, it’s just that Carney’s long-form fits a business model opposite of what TBI has pursued.

Jay
@marketfolly

I do, however, want to clarify one thing– you write, “TBI has published 2,547 stories in March to date — all with an editorial staff of 15, plus three interns. Ignoring weekends for the sake of simplicity, that works out at 8.5 posts per person per day”.

This math is actually incorrect since TBI uses links to so many articles written by other sites, such as Reuters, All Things D, Forbes, etc. Additionally, they have a lot of guest bloggers. So the posts per person per day is probably much lower, of which I would say 50% are thoughtful and insightful content and 50% are page-pumping posts. I would love for them to skew 70/30, but as a start-up I will deal.

Thanks for the post.

“As always, there’s a trade-off between quantity and quality. Should you write more, with lower quality, or less, with higher quality? Fortunately, the blogosphere has been around for long enough that we have a simple empirical answer to this question: given the choice, go for quantity over quality. You might not like it — I certainly don’t — but I defy you to name a really good blogger who doesn’t blog frequently.”

Been following the twitter battle between you two because I enjoy a good debate, by intelligent people that are able to keep it civil.

More importantly than enjoying a good debate, I’m learning something.

Thanks for making Twitterville a little more entertaining.

The challenge today is that even those publishers which cultivate a quality audience are having difficulties monetizing that audience. A high quality niche audience, like the readership of Footnoted or The Big Picture, won’t generate much revenue in today’s economy.

I think that will change in time, as advertisers’ perceptions change. For now, there’s no easy answer. But one thing remains clear: while high quality editorial won’t automatically deliver revenues, low quality editorial has little chance to do so, instead competing with Associated Content, Seed, About.com and Demand Media. And that’s not where most of us want to be.