NBC: still not getting the blogger thing

Once you're accepted into the BlogBurst network, just keep blogging as usual. Then, each time one of our publishers picks up your content, you'll reach a whole new audience — and your byline link will drive traffic to your blog.

In other words:

You just keep slaving away creating content, you mouth-breathing, pajama-wearing, 40-year-old virgin who lives over your parents garage, and even though we utterly despise everything about you and everything you stand for, including your mangy cat, we’ll totally take the fruits of your labor and distribute them to greedy corporate drones who couldn’t replicate an original voice if Jack Bauer were threatening them with waterboarding, and we’ll collect all the dough, m’kay? Thanks.

It’ll like a corporate-fuck train. BlogBurst will fuck you, and through them such outfits as Reuters, Gannett, The Washington Post, and Discovery will fuck you again. And you’ll love it!

So of course I let loose on the poor young MBA who’s in the firing line at NBC, who’s trying to make nice to us bloggers because memos from her completely dense bosses tell her to:

Look: blogging is a medium. You're dealing with writers who happen to use blogs to communicate with their audiences. You would never expect a writer who writes longhand on a legal yellow pad to just hand over that work for free. So why do you expect that of writers who use blogs?

With every new initiative you -- and here I mean NBC -- bring before us, you convince many of us that NBC hasn't got a clue what to do with the Internet, or understand what it is that makes blogging different, in some ways, from that writer with a legal pad. The writer with a legal pad needs someone to spread his word far and wide, and it used to be that it was platforms like big publishing houses, major magazines, Hollywood studios, and TV networks that were the gatekeepers to audiences. But now we bloggers don't need the gatekeepers -- we make our own platforms, and the people we're speaking to don't need to go through middlemen to hear us. I know this new reality scares companies like NBC, but we don't need NBC -- NBC needs us. Or thinks it does. But either NBC doesn't recognize that, which is bad, or else NBC thinks it can get away with fooling us into thinking that we need NBC more than NBC needs us. That's what's so insulting. The bloggers I spoke to at and after the summit -- both people I've known for years and people I met that night -- all felt very condescended to.

I got the feeling that the guys in charge were expecting a bunch of kids to show up, but I'm sure you could all see that the vast majority of us were in the over-35 demographic that VP spoke about as if that would be a revelation to us. That one on-air guy (whose name I can't remember -- I don't watch WNBC news!) who talked about being almost 40 and feeling out of the loop... Yes, he most certainly is out of the loop, as NBC is on the whole. I'm almost 40 too, and I've been online for 20 years, and running web sites for 10. I'm guessing you're young enough that you've probably been online most of your life. But these guys in charge... it seems as if they fundamentally do not understand the Internet, and don't want to learn. They're trying to push an old-media paradigm onto the new, and it won't work. It is absolutely doomed to fail. I'm not sure if what they're trying to do is even possible within such an entrenched corporate structure.

So as insulted as many of us were, honestly, we also thought it was pretty funny. Because we could see that we have nothing to fear from NBC, and that NBC is afraid of us. I've been in the corporate world, as have been many people who are now enjoying the freedom of being their own bosses as bloggers. We're emphatically NOT people with no experience of the world, and we can see both sides of the fence. I sense that those in charge at NBC of this blogger initiative cannot.

Please, share this with your bosses if you want. Hey, there you are: some consultation on new media and Internet, free for nuthin'. :->

And so I expect thay any day now -- yes, any day now -- NBC VPs will be knocking down my door asking for advice about the Internets.

(Technorati tags: blogger summit, BlogBurst)