I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, and please go out of your way to quote me: I will get behind any plan that improves the Tea Makers. I’m not sure the current plan will do that. That plan is to do a Gawker-like conversion of the site, transforming it from a niche Weblog for gossip, bitching, and “leaks” about the CBC to generalized discussion of Canadian media.
I don’t object to that idea, and this isn’t personal. It’s just that the time for such centralized discussion is past. It’s an idea from the era of the original Tea Makers, which itself centralized discussion. There were still critics with their own blogs, but if you wanted dirt on the Corpse or wanted to vent, there was one place to go.
You still see centralization online today. It’s just rarer. Daring Fireball is the standard example, and it’s a good one – relentless sole authorship with undiluted point of view; unapologetic curation; no comments. It works. (Getting Fireballed will take down your box. Trust me on that.)
But nowadays, every Canadian media critic has his (sic) own blog – even Bill Houston. They’ve staked out their own claim, to reuse a metaphor. At the next level up (at the real level, the American level), the same thing is happening: No less an éminence than Michael Wolff has a blog. In a lot of cases there’s a multi-platform strategy involving a blog and the Twitter (and, for the younger crowd, the Flickr, the Facebook, the Posterous). The Twitter is now an important platform. Even I use it and don’t loathe it anymore.
This is the key factor that dooms Alphonse Ouimet’s project. People aren’t just maintaining their own personal-branded blogs. People expect everything to come through the Twitter now. It is the idiot’s RSS. An actually intelligent and capable person who wants to follow Canadian media, or any subject, does so with the use of RSS feeds (in my case, 1,690 of them). But just as MP3 sounds worse than CD and vinyl but is smaller and more convenient, the Twitter works adequately for idiots as a push medium for news. Alphonse Ouimet uses the Twitter in this fashion.
Nobody wants to go to a centralized site to discuss Canadian media. They want news about Canadian media to find its way to them. By definition it needn’t come from one place. Then they write their own pissy Twits about it and call it analysis.
The antecedents cited aren’t convincing, either. Jesse Brown’s Nonfiction was the most spectacular of his off-kilter ideas. (How many of his ideas work?) It didn’t die just because it had to – by consuming its own feedstock of unreported industry gossip. It died because that kind of centralization went out of fashion.
Hence I am not advancing skepticism about Alphonse Ouimet’s idea because he’s the one who came up with it. I just think it is an idea from a previous era.
Now, accountability becomes an important question. I have previously posited – correctly – that the reason why Alphonse Ouimet is untroubled by the cesspool of anonymous and pseudonymous comments he cultivates is because he has been so little troubled by everything that’s happened to him in living memory. He is not to be underestimated; neither his his resilience. But it has left him devoid of empathy. He is unable to understand, at any level, the harm that Tea Makers comments cause. As such he is unable to care. Plus, in true social-media-triumphalist fashion, he claims to value “the conversation” above all else.
Any site that purports to discuss media and journalism while allowing anonymous or pseudonymous comments, or comments of any authorship of the sort found on the Tea Makers, is a contradiction in terms. You can’t be an accountable journalist if you slag off other journalists without signing your name. The only way this could possibly work is if everybody has an explicit identity that matches their real-world bylines. But even then, slagging comments would have to be banned and deleted. Alphonse Ouimet thinks comments like that are the juiciest and prove his system works.
Nouvelle nouvelle formulation Tea Makers is a way for a Canadian living outside the country to maintain the illusion that he’s still a kingmaker in the Toronto media demimonde. Corollary: A discussion site about Canadian media cannot be run by a pseudonymous coward resident in another country. To be more precise, resident in New York, as Ouimet implied this week. (The only place he could talk to Clay Shirky in the last week was in New York, where Shirky lives and where he presented at Book Expo America. Shirky didn’t answer a fact-checking E-mail on that topic.)
The cloaked identity of Alphonse Ouimet will not last a day if such a site launches.