Mainstream Media Commentary, Or Lack Thereof

Everyone who writes for the public makes mistakes, bloggers and journalists alike. Take, for example, this article in which Marketing Vox mistakenly identifies Buzz Targeting as a Yahoo product, when in fact it’s a Google product (the Buzz Targeting link in the screenshot leads here).

It’s a fairly harmless mistake, but it’s still up on the site, about six hours after I first discovered it. Here’s why: Marketing Vox doesn’t allow users to post comments. On a site with comments, multiple users would have pointed the issue out long ago. Sure, they can still send an email to the editor, but apparently they haven’t…because there’s no glory in that. But what a great feeling to see your own name on a major site, with text underneath that makes the site’s content better. Marketing Vox also doesn’t accept trackbacks, meaning that, for example, readers of the article I’m writing about won’t know that I wrote this post unless they happen to come here for some other reason.

I don’t mean to pick on Marketing Vox specifically. I skim its RSS feed in my aggregator (which happens to be Google Reader), and often read the articles. This is a problem in a lot of major journalism websites…not just online versions of print publications like The New York Times, but also other major sources about the state of the online media industry, such as MediaBuyerPlanner (which I also read religiously).

Many companies that promote themselves as harbingers of what’s to come are themselves still afraid to embrace what is already here.