I read this article a while back couldn't finish it. It just seems the writers' of The Verge's main point is that The Awl is great because it's read by the most important people in media like ourselves.
The Verge is the same tech reporting that I can find elsewhere with better graphic design and an editorial style that trys to look a bit further than 5 inches past their nose.
In other words, The Verge has a low hurdle to jump over to be better than most tech writing. They are far from the best. Their coverage isn't very deep and their technologists aren't very insightful nor very good at predicting what's next. I find Ars Technica and Anandtech to be far better technically while not being nearly so smug and self-important as the Verge. Their greatest contribution so far has been their 10 minute wrapup of "All the things you need to know about tech conference X". That is merely the blog post of the youtube generation. Not insignificant but, nothing really groundbreaking nor the best of their industry.
While I haven't read nearly as much of the Awl, I have stumbled upon a few of their articles over the years and nothing has struck me as profoundly better than the rest. Just filled with the thought that they are.
I have enjoyed the Awl pretty much since its inception, they run a lot of good writing. The ambivalence Sicha and the editors exhibit here about the future and everything else is irksome, though. It's like, figure out what the hell you want to do already. Six years! Oh my goodness! Yes, time passes. Please try not to faint.
Then clearly you're not part of the distinguished group known as "the most important people in media", because The Verge is asking us:
Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl?
Seems like there's clear market demand for a blog called The The, where self-aggrandizing bloggers write about their similarly immodest blogger friends.
I love the Awl, Splitsider, Billfold et al...
But the Media Apocalypse is no Joke - The Dissolve is gone - and ViralNova is acquired for $100MM - WTF? It seems content for brainy, niche audiences will not survive due to low scale.
Unfortunately the web is finding the lowest common denominators for content consumption, and it certainly seems that those who deliver it best will survive. With 3MM uniques it seems to small to matter. Hope it does become the surviving cockroach...but it doesnt look good. Just hope the web stops becoming 'Idiocracy' for clicks.
The fold of The Dissolve has nothing to do with the acquisition of ViralNova other than one could make money and the other could not. It's nothing more than one selling brocolli on the street corner and one selling candy. ViralNova makes cheap, fast, sticky content that no one really cares about. The Dissolve made content that not enough people cared about. The real competitor to The Dissolve is the amateur. All over the web, there are dozens if not hundreds of opinions about popular culture made by amateurs for their own enjoyment and distributed for free. The Dissolve and places like it cannot convince enough people to just give their time and attention because the product that they produce, their opinions on popular culture aren't proving to be so different of such a better quality than the rest of the internet combined. A quick google search for any topic and especially a popular one will return litterally millions of options to choose from. That's what the Dissolve is competing with, not ViralNova or The New York Times or The New Yorker but, all of them and the army of amateurs giving their opinions for free to anyone who will listen. The Dissolve is not better than that to enough people that they could get advertising to support themselves. Pointing to ViralNova as a reason is smoke-screen; a cynical and myopic answer to a complex question. It's never been better to be a consumer, to be a reader of popular culture despite the loudly bemoaned death of large media outlets. Now, there are problems with long form journalism and it's impact on democracy but, opinions on movies, video games, music and all popular culture are flourishing despite the death of places like The Dissolve.
Based on this, then everyone is an expert now, all you need is an opinion and an URL. So a random 19 year old's opinion is as valuable as an expert? Practically, of course not, but your arguments is that online, it doesn't matter. Expert and non-expert are the same. If that is the case, then its not cynical to say lowbrow content (even fake content, e.g. Clickhole) will beat quality content in the long run. I would rather get my Movie review notes from knowledgeable people than from a random responder at Yahoo Answers or a random YouTube video grapher ranting about Avengers and Female Ghostbusters, but if you really believe amateur content beats anything else, and the primary survival metrics are advertising dollars and scale, then nothing will survive because nothing would scale. In the scenario you describe, what content scales? Whatever ends at FB?
The Verge is the same tech reporting that I can find elsewhere with better graphic design and an editorial style that trys to look a bit further than 5 inches past their nose.
In other words, The Verge has a low hurdle to jump over to be better than most tech writing. They are far from the best. Their coverage isn't very deep and their technologists aren't very insightful nor very good at predicting what's next. I find Ars Technica and Anandtech to be far better technically while not being nearly so smug and self-important as the Verge. Their greatest contribution so far has been their 10 minute wrapup of "All the things you need to know about tech conference X". That is merely the blog post of the youtube generation. Not insignificant but, nothing really groundbreaking nor the best of their industry.
While I haven't read nearly as much of the Awl, I have stumbled upon a few of their articles over the years and nothing has struck me as profoundly better than the rest. Just filled with the thought that they are.