Gawker founder Nick Denton might arguably have been known as a 'blogger' and 'blog business' entrepreneur in the past, serving up 'snarky' commentary on news.
These days, he seems to prefer the alternate strategy of becoming an actual provider of original news. For some people, that will represent a huge shift; for others simply an affirmation that the lines between blogging and journalism are porous.
Gizmodo, Gawker, IO9 and Lifehacker might be viewed as blogs. Some of us would disagree, in part. But the larger point might be that a Google-like attention to 'data driven' decision making has driven Denton to realize that 'news' drives readership.
'Duh!' you might say. Media outlets tend to complain that they are the source of most fodder for blog commentary. That's true. Denton now sees that the way to grow is to simply shift attention from commentary on news, to becoming a news outlet.
It's a shift that might be subtle on some levels, and more significant on others. Despite the debates of several years ago about the difference between blogging and journalism, there still is limited clarity about the differences and similarities, because both pursuits have changed, and are changing.
Observers might disagree about the ultimate success of AOL's "Huffington Post" makeover. But there is little disagreement about the fact that both content curation and content creation now are seen as important ports of the enterprise. The former is collecting and pointing to work already created by others, while the latter consists of more-traditional writing or journalism.
The Gawker moves also highlight a separate but related trend: more brands or companies are becoming "media" in their own right.
The way I would describe it is that buyers of products begin their search for solutions to problems, in both a business and consumer context, long before any supplier has any idea those potential customers actually have begun their buying process.
The key insight is that the end user buying process begins long before a supplier sales process can begin. In other words, people and companies start a buying process without letting the suppliers know. The obvious implication is that by the time some formal interest is expressed to a supplier, by a buyer, lots of the fundamental decisions already have been made.
Buyers already have rejected some approaches, and embraced others. They have culled the potential suppliers to a manageable and small list. Buyers have decided why certain approaches make sense for them, what they think they should be paying, and why.
If a supplier waits until this buyer process is finished, many suppliers already have been rejected. So the reason any brand needs to establish a credible, reliable presence in the content space is to be visible and relevant during the early "research" stages of any buying process, which, by definition, occur before any particular brand can start its own "selling" process.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
