Silicon Insider: MSM, Meet the Blogosphere

Oct. 27, 2005 — -- The sea! The sea!

Please excuse the bloggy style of this column, but I'm writing it on short breaks between meetings. As you read this, I am in New York City co-hosting a conference.

It is officially entitled "The Oxford & York Media, Communications & Technology Summit" -- but it really is the first annual summit meeting between Mainstream Media and the blogosphere. For that reason, the panelists range from senior executives at Reuters, the Financial Times, Forbes and Sony BMG Music to, on the other end, folks from Yahoo!, Odeo and AdventuresofChester.com. The audience, largely composed of CEOs and advertising executives, is equally diverse. The goal is not to throw spitballs at each other (which has largely characterized relations between the MSM and blogosphere in the past) but to see if there is some common ground where the two can work together.

Frankly, they have to -- each has something the other needs to survive. The MSM has the money and the infrastructure. Over the centuries, it has perfected the art of converting print into dollars. But the MSM is also in trouble, losing both customers and legitimacy at a shocking rate. The recent circulation scandals among the nation's leading newspapers, the Dan Rather/"60 Minutes" fiasco, and now the astonishing self-destruction of The New York Times, show just how desperate and troubled the MSM has become.

What the MSM lacks, the blogosphere has in spades: energy, momentum, and a growing audience. But what bloggers lack is money -- bloggers have yet to find an efficient way to turn their hard work into revenue … and until they do, blogging will always be a lonely sidelight, vulnerable to dying with the next missed mortgage check.

Natural antagonists, the mainstream media and the blogosphere now need to find a way to work together -- or both the news and publishing professions will find themselves in an even worse crisis than they are in now, and all of us will be the worse for it. That's why this summit is over-subscribed, and last minute sign-ups were still taking place even as I got on the plane yesterday.

The Impending Launch of Pajamas Media

Though the topics today cover everything from evolving revenue models to piracy, and the social impact to new media versus old, easily the most anticipated event at the summit was last night's keynote speech by Roger L. Simon. Simon had already enjoyed a successful career as a novelist (the Moses Wine detective novels) and screenwriter ("Enemies: A Love Story") when he discovered the then-new world of Web logs.

Since then, his blog, www.RogerLSimon.com, with its unique combination of strong opinions, Hollywood perspective and clear prose, has made it one of the world's most popular and influential blogs. [Simon is also posting from the summit.]

His blog alone would be enough to make Roger a popular dinner attraction. But these days he is an even bigger draw, thanks to stepping up as CEO of the new Pajamas Media. PM -- its name (which may soon change) derives from a dismissive comment made about bloggers by a CBS executive last year -- is the most talked about secret on the Web. Simon regularly delivers hints about its progress on his site, and for the last month the best-known PMers (Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit, for example) have been running daily profiles of bloggers that have signed up with Pajamas Media. They are an extraordinarily wide-ranging group, from noted political pundits like Michael Barone to a lady who runs a Web site for dogs, and a guy who writes about spelunking, to the most famous of the on-the-ground bloggers from the War in Iraq (Iraq the Model).

From the day it was first announced, Pajamas Media (www.pajamasmedia.com] has been seen as perhaps representing a revolutionary new business structure for the Web, an aggregation site for bloggers that would give them the kind of economies of scale, access to advertisers, steady pay and mass impact that, until now, was the sole province of the traditional MSM. Many believe Pajamas Media will be able to compete directly with traditional media for the big advertisers -- and thus give the blogosphere a financial stability it has never known.

Though Pajamas Media isn't supposed to officially announce itself until next month, Simon did drop enough clues to whet the audience's appetite, as well as confirm that the PM management appreciate the challenges ahead and what is at stake.

Getting the Readers Involved

Though Simon was still pretty cagey about details last night, wanting to save any big news for the official launch on Nov. 16, it was possible to glean that Pajamas Media will kick off with about 70 blogs on its site and grow to many times that in the months ahead. These blogs will be chosen from across the political spectrum, and will also include lifestyle and sports sites.

In keeping with the nature of the Internet, PM will operate 24/7, with managing editors in L.A., Sydney and Barcelona. An editorial board will approve stories before they appear, and corrections will be made on the front page in real time. There will be no editing of the blogs themselves, to preserve their independence. In every way, readers will be intimately involved with the site, from commenting and correcting, to submitting content, especially events on the ground in distant corners of the world -- ultimately providing streaming video.

At the heart of Pajamas Media will be a "common" page, through which visitors will be able to see the latest breaking stories, features and links, and then be able to navigate quickly to them. Most of these features, however, are still under wraps.

At the heart of Pajamas Media, says Simon, is that "we are going to be a true citizens' site," dedicated to giving readers all points of view, not (like traditional media) deciding what they need to know.

Will It Succeed?

Will Pajamas Media make it? I've been around too many start-ups in too many brand new industries to make any prediction in confidence. But I will predict that the very existence of Pajamas Media will lead to the creation of scores of other online media companies rushing to imitate its business model. I'll also predict that one -- or perhaps even many -- of these imitators will find the perfect combination, will create a vast new media industry sector that will be chased by scores of venture capitalists and thousands of young entrepreneurs. And their arrival will signal the end of the MSM as we know it.

It can't happen soon enough. Ironically, while flying in from Silicon Valley, I read an absorbing new book by an Oxford classics professor (Oxford's Said Business School is a co-sponsor of the summit) named Tim Rood, entitled "The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand and the Modern Imagination" (Duckworth, 2004).

That title (in Greek, "Thalatta! Thalatta!") is one of those phrases that is so resonant that it keeps popping up throughout the last 2,500 years in novels, plays, paintings -- and most recently, in movies. It comes from the climactic moment of one of history's greatest adventure stories, "The Anabasis" by Xenophon. As the tale goes, 13,000 Greek soldiers, rendered unemployed by the end of the Peloponnesian War, sign on as mercenaries for a Persian prince named Cyrus, supposedly to fight some rebels. It turns out that Cyrus in fact intends to attack the current king and take his throne. In the decisive battle, fought near Baghdad, the Greeks fight brilliantly -- but the prince is killed and the rest of the army collapses. The Greeks try to negotiate a safe departure, but are betrayed and their generals murdered.

And thus begins the adventure that has haunted Western Civilization for more than two millennia: The Greeks have to fight, trick, and march their way more than 1,000 miles through enemy territory in modern Turkey, Syria and Iraq to get back to Greece. They succeed through a combination of teamwork, guts and the charismatic leadership of Xenophon, among others. The climactic moment comes when, in eastern Turkey, the exhausted army climbs a mountain pass … and sees, in the distance, the Black Sea and the safe ending to their journey. The soldiers are so excited they start shouting "The sea! The sea!"

That phrase has haunted western civilization ever since, coming to mean the exhilarating end of a perilous journey. It shows up in Roman poems and plays, in 19th century adventure stories, in the 20th century in POW escape memoirs, and most remarkably, in Joyce's "Ulysses."

The death of classical education means that today's school kids, unlike their Greek-speaking Victorian predecessors, have never heard of Xenophon, much less the cry. Still, it's interesting to note that my boys' favorite cult film is "The Warriors," which is the Anabasis translated to the dark and foreboding street gang world of 1970s New York, in which the sea lies off Coney Island.

Reading the book made me think of the 10 million bloggers out there. They have spent years now in the wilderness, defeating one obstacle after another, somehow surviving the hard times, devoting billions of hours to their dream of one day turning their Web logs into real careers. Now, Pajamas Media gives them a glimpse of salvation just ahead.

Thalatta! Thalatta!

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone, once called "the Boswell of Silicon Valley," most recently was editor at large of Forbes ASAP magazine. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 20 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury-News as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He has hosted two national PBS shows: "Malone," a half-hour interview program that ran for nine years; and a 16-part interview series in 2001 called "Betting It All: The Entrepreneurs." Malone is best known as the author of a dozen books: his latest, a collection of his best newspaper and magazine writings, is called "The Valley of Heart's Delight" (Wiley).