Mathew Ingram Busts a Move
A top tier journalist (Mathew Ingram: @mathewi) at a top-tier national newspaper (The Globe & Mail: http://www.theglobeandmail.com) leaves a director-level job to become a senior writer at a top-tier blog network (GigaOM).
He’s playing nice by acknowledging his excitement about the new gig and expressing some measure of lament about leaving a ~20 year association with The Globe. It’s probably not even ‘playing’ — no doubt he’s sincere about some of his attachment to the old gig. But clearly, as a journalist, he sees this as a step up, or maybe more appropriately a step in, that is, further into the space that has always been his area-of-interest, a space he has been pivotal in getting his former employer to move into (and what a colossal effort that must have been, and continues to be).
I’ve seen some tweets and posts celebrating that fact that a high-profile move like this further legitimizes the blogosphere. Well, it legitimizes part of the blogosphere. Editorially and professionally (that means financially), top-tier blogs make good homes for top-tier journalists. And let’s not forget that GigaOM is not just a little bit more than a blog… GigaOM may not have a print edition; and may have more flexibility in terms of content formats and distribution methods, but its success still comes down to what are probably simple seminal principles of journalism.
For my part I expect Mathew Ingram to continue to do good work, and he’ll no doubt have a much better time doing it, and being effective/pervasive in ways that would be more difficult to achieve under the banner of The Globe. Not too worried about him. Will keep an eye on The Globe, though. Will be interesting to see how much of the internal battle was being waged by Ingram and who/how/if the void will be filled.
At home we get The Globe one day late: piggy-backing off a friend’s subscription—he kindly drops it off each morning on his way to work. For current news my wife and I both rely entirely on online sources. Neither of us are inclined to spend money on a daily paper (for my part I’m taking my objection to newspapers from an environment perspective more and more seriously). The day-late arrangement we have satisfies a lingering nostalgia for the tactile aesthetic of the ol’ broadsheet, and little else. The nostalgia fades daily.
