“I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty”
Working for a social media company, dating a professional blogger, and reinvesting myself in online publishing, I’ve been thinking a lot about the merits of new media lately. I had a wonderful conversation last night with Brittney Gilbert of CBS KPIX, Kathryn Hill of Stone Deaf Pilots and Apartment Therapy, and Alex Payne of Twitter about the merits of Yelp (full disclosure: an employer of mine) last night, and how much of a turnoff some of the reviews can be - the ones that explain the writer’s full day and then apply the business being reviewed as metaphor for their perspective on life or who step in a pile of dogshit later that night and blame it on the restaurant. Brittney said she trusted the viewpoint of a professional food critic over a Yelp windbag, and certainly there’s merit to that - but I don’t think you should discount opinions for lack of credentials on Yelp any more so than we do with blogs written by non-journalists. There are a lot of terrible reviews and blogs out there - and a lot of gems. It takes time and exposure to separate the wheat from the chaff anywhere online. That doesn’t make the tools less valuable, from where I sit.
Anyway, that’s a long buildup to the following video, a conversation on Bob Costas’s show with Will Leitch of Deadspin (one of the premier sports blogs out there), Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, and Braylon Edwards of the Cleveland Browns.
Buzz clearly doesn’t like blogs: “I really think you’re full of shit. I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to journalistic dishonesty,” he says, before attacking Leitch’s reading habits and the fact that he’s a Cardinals (AZ fan). Later, “[blogs] are the complete dumbing down of our society.”
Costas does a good job of bringing it back to some perspective and Leitch puts together the point that wraps up my point on blogging and Yelp perfectly: it’s a meritocracy. Some stuff is good, some is terrible. There is some discretion required of the reader to discern good from bad, but there is plenty of value in letting all the voices cry out.
Plus, if your day has a better moment than Bob Costas reading out “Good riddance, fuckface. So long, you fetus faced windbag,” I’d like to know what it is.
As a human aggregator of blog content, I obviously agree that some blogs ar good, and that some blogs are bad. (Though I might go so far as to say most are bad.) And right after I said that about a pro critic over a Yelper I heard the hypocrisy of it. I have long been a champion of self-publishing online because it is a way to discover keen insights and fantastic writing that might not otherwise see the light of day due to how difficult it used to be to have your work published.
I suppose what I was trying to say, through a gimlet haze, was that Yelp doesn’t do that great a job of separating the good reviewers from the bad ones. I find there to be so much wasted space talking about things not related to the business being reviewed that I find it difficult to get a recommendation in a timely fashion. There is just *so much* in terms of content on Yelp that I find myself getting sucked in, when what I really want is a quick guide. I’m not sure how one becomes an Elite Yelper, but those folks do not seem to have better constructed reviews than an average Yelper.
I like the snark and wit of many Yelp reviewers. But I wonder if there is too much “fluffery” in many of the reviews for them to be helpful to the average man looking for a place to get a haircut. It’s almost as if you need to be active on Yelp by spending plenty of time there before you can really get a good gauge on things. Anyway, I appreciate being called out on the comment about professional critics, because a) it’s not what I really think and b) it’s dumb.
I want to like Yelp, and I think they have a ton of great things going for them. But judging it primarily by how useful it is to me personally, I have to give it just 2 stars.
re: video
I love the “The Internet” graphic on that screen. So ominous and all-encompassing. Also, Bissinger? That is the sound of pure fear. Pure, unadulterated fear. The grasp of old media is weakening by the day and they are losing jobs and money with an unbelievable quickness. I feel sorry for him and those like him who choose to live out the rest of their (admittedly talented) days in anger rather than adapting to changes in their medium.
And he hadn’t fucked a horse in a week.
(Comment trifecta!)