Cashing in on weblogs: major media companies are investing in blogs. Is this a new boom or just a bubble?

AuthorWelch, Matt

Back before he started single-handedly defending the U.S.-Mexican border, CNN personality Lou Dobbs was obsessed with an altogether different frontier: space.

Perhaps more accurately, Dobbs got momentarily wobbly at the sight of workaday schlubs on far lower rungs of the journalistic ladder becoming paper millionaires overnight by virtue of working for such now-forgotten webzines as Quokka Sports, Garden.com, and NextCard. So in June 1999, at the tail end of the last great dot-com bubble, Dobbs jumped headlong into Space.com. "I believe space is the most exciting and biggest news story of this year and of the next millennium," he gushed to The New York Times. "I'm fundamentally a journalist, and can't resist the biggest story."

Dobbs managed to locate his resistance within just 22 months, when the blockheaded business broadcaster crawled off the sinking, Nasdaq-battered spaceship back to CNN, joining such temporary online enthusiasts as APBnews' Sydney Schanberg, ForeignTV.com's Peter Arnett, and Contentville's Steven Brill. Once the funny money was gone, so too were the celebrity journalists.

Now they're back with a vengeance, and this time they're hitching their wagon to what was the lowliest of online life forms six years ago: weblogs. On May 9 (after this issue of reason goes to press), the world should see the debut of The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com), where political cocktail-party queen Arianna Huffington will orchestrate a group blog that threatens to feature 250 of the country's most wealthy and influential media figures: David Geffen, Walter Cronkite, Barry Diller, Warren Beatty, Mort Zuckerman, Nora Ephron, Norman Mailer, Brian Grazer, Jann Wenner, Norman Lear, Gary Hart, Tina Brown, and so on. Apparently, running Hollywood, Manhattan, and Washington, D.C., isn't satisfying enough; they want some of that hot blog buzz!

Besides celebrity bandwagon jumpers, Huffington is bringing to the scrappy blogosphere three hallmarks of a bubble mentality: media hype, staffing bloat (including offices on both coasts), and actual investment capital. Her financial partner, fittingly, is Kenneth Lerer, a former executive vice president of the Internet boom's last great hurrah, the company formerly known as AOL Time Warner. (After Nasdaq collapsed within months of that merger, the company's stock tanked, and now it is once again known as Time Warner. America Online has been demoted to a subset.)

The Huffington Post arrives in the midst of...

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