Guy Kewney

What’s the difference between Personal Computer World and Big Brother? It’s a trick question and the answer is: ‘Not much. Both are attempts at entertainment.’

Those of us who work in what we call ‘news’ are, at the end of the day, competing for attention. We’re dancing up on the table, shouting ‘Look at me!’

But, instead of showing vague movements under a blanket where two people appear to be asleep, we’re showing things which we label ‘important!’

So, if traditional publishing is to survive the ‘blogalanche’, it has to find some way of seeming more important than what individual bloggers have to offer.

Take boxing. Around the time I was writing this, British boxer Chris Eubank was selling the video of a particular fight over the Internet.

Specifically, he had set up a website aimed at mobile phone users where, for £10, you can download and watch another boxer receiving brain injuries which left him in a wheelchair.

Important? According to Eubank and his publicists, yes. ‘Arguably one of the five most important fights ever,’ they told me and anyway, Eubank himself cries his eyes out when he sees it.

I’m not into boxing and find the idea of a brain-damage accident as an important sporting event weird, but that’s just me: millions of people think it is important and, until now, couldn’t watch the fight because ITV (which owned copyright) put an embargo on it on the grounds of good taste.

So unless you recorded it live back in 1991, you couldn’t see it, important or not.

For readers of PCW, the word ‘important’ means things like ‘what does news editor Clive Akass think about the new Origami platform?’ and if they buy the magazine, then they are prepared to pay each month to find out.

Traditional wisdom was that this process was called journalism and that it was almost the only way of getting to see behind the curtain of secrecy most industrial enterprises create.

They like to hide what they do behind a veil and you find out no more than what their outlets allow you to.

And then, people who work for the industrial enterprises started publishing in their own right, and for an awful lot of people, this was far better than journalism. The question that hasn’t been answered yet is ‘how long can this be true?’ The answer is not what people are assuming it is.

Bloggers who are experts in their field, and able to tell you more about Origami than Clive Akass can, are often people who work for the companies involved.

Already, we’re seeing such people getting mown down by their employers. You can lose your job just for talking to a journalist; but if you start trying to be a journalist, your career will not necessarily flourish.

People who were seen challenging Microsoft on its stance in China, wearing their ‘I work in Redmond’ badges, are moderating their voices and explaining that ‘it’s more complicated than that and I can’t say any more.’

Some of these bloggers are turning into publishers and journalists. Instead of venting their own personal experience and opinion, you’ll see people doing blogs like Engadget contacting suppliers, asking them questions and writing down what they say.

That’s journalism. By no coincidence, Peter Rojas (editor of Engadget) is a professional journalist.

What has changed is simple: journalism is no longer the only way of ‘getting your message out’ to the reader. Microsoft can do Channel Nine videocasts on the web and you can watch and learn – which is much better than the old days, when all you could do was send off for a brochure.

But how helpful is this really? In the long term, it’s just a better brochure. It’s what Microsoft wants to tell you, not what you may judge as important.

The good news is that the PC and the Internet have given us a new media-garden, with a new perspective on what may be important. Immediacy, for example, is one gift of Google News. Variety, too; you don’t have to buy a copy of each publication in the market to find out what all the expert observers think.

But there is bad news: for a short while, a lot of these expert observers are going to be out of work. The clearing of the forest may mean new trees in the future; but in the interim, much value will be lost. And that’s definitely important.

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