Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Does the New York Times Know What It Bought?

Does the New York Times Know What It Bought?

PaidContent has a revealing Q & A with Martin Nisenholtz, SVP-Digital Operations, for the New York Times Co. He discussed his company’s purchase of About.com for $410 million. I don’t feel I’m qualified to comment on the financial sense of the deal, but do have major reservations about the cultural issues to will need to be resolved.

Compare this front page:

With this one:

The New York Times, which recently suffered a recent scandal that hinged on the poor journalism of just one of its reporters, has bought a company that aggregates information from all corners of the Internet using a staff of editor-free volunteers. About.com’s “guides” may be extremely knowledgeable, but I can’t think of a greater culture clash, as evidenced by this quote:

Q: In some respects, the Times is now the largest blogging company in the world. Do you consider what you have acquired to be 500 blogs?
Nisenholtz: No. I’ve never actually seen the definition of a blog, so I don’t know quite where the boundaries of what a blog is… I don’t think it’s a very useful term. Someone said to me the other day that there are 23,000 new blogs added to the web every day and I thought back to Tripod and Geocities when they said that. I don’t think About is anything like that but I do think About pioneered the whole notion of people who have a passion contributing their competency and skill to communicate that to other people and that’s what the web is all about whether you want to call it a blog or a web site or an email.

It’s clear that Nisenholtz didn’t help “blog” become most looked-up word of the year at Merriam-Webster. Perhaps Nisenholtz should have looked up the definition of Weblog before he entered into his long bet (source) with Dave Winer.

And I also think it points to future integration problems when the top digital poobah of the New York Times doesn’t realize he’s bought the largest blog software installation outside a blog software company.

Posted by Travis Smith on 02/18 at 09:48 PM • Blogging News -- Blogs and Business