The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Just Under the Wire--and still a proud member of the "Army"
Count me in as someone who has ordered my copy of the new Glenn Reynolds book An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths, and who did so last week--BEFORE this excellent review by Mark Steyn. Below is the introduction to the longer review--go here to read the rest:
Stop me if you've heard this one before, but what happened to all the mom 'n' pop stores? Go to Anytown, U.S.A. -- or Canada, or Belgium or Latvia -- and it's all Home Depot and Wal-Mart and Dunkin' Donuts.
And yet there is a curious exception to this trend: the media. If the New York Times and ABC and Knight Ridder are the equivalent of the Wal-Marts and Home Depots, they're getting picked off five, 10, a hundred customers at a time by a gazillion mom 'n' pop outfits -- the Drudge Report, Power Line, realclearpolitics.com and a myriad of other Internet wallahs.
Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, was one of the first of the big-time bloggers -- or, as we old-media bores say, "bloggers." He hung out his shingle in the summer of 2001 as Instapundit.
By Sept. 10, he had some 1,600 readers a day. On Sept. 11, it tripled, and in the weeks after that it soared. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world now dial him up first thing in the morning and throughout the day.
That's a lot fewer than, say, the seven million viewers who tune in to the CBS Evening News. But, on the other hand, professor Reynolds' overheads are less than the budget for Dan Rather's hairdresser. Hurricane Dan recently retired, of course, and his successor, Bob Schieffer, is more modestly coiffed, but it will take more economies than that to negate my point: a guy with a laptop and some friendly emailers from Hollywood to Afghanistan can pull an audience a 10th of the size of a mega-global news operation in a big skyscraper in New York full of thousands of employees with lavish benefits.
Reynolds has now written a book called An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths. It's one of the most enjoyable reads I've had in a long time, not because the author is a great prose stylist but because he's an enthusiast who communicates his enthusiasm very infectiously and effectively. He's one of those guys who, if he gets a yen to do something, just gets on with it. Fifteen years ago, he decided he'd had enough of lousy tasteless American beer, so he decided to brew his own. A few years later, he decided he'd like to start producing albums, so he did. His brother had business that took him to Africa, and had heard some Ugandan band he liked, and there was some Polish company that makes studio-quality software you can download off the Internet, and so a few weeks later he was a record producer. He's not Phil Ramone or Mitch Miller, but on the other hand he's not losing money. And, as he points out, for the boys in the band, when you convert any U.S. dollars into Ugandan shillings it goes a long way.
Stop me if you've heard this one before, but what happened to all the mom 'n' pop stores? Go to Anytown, U.S.A. -- or Canada, or Belgium or Latvia -- and it's all Home Depot and Wal-Mart and Dunkin' Donuts.
And yet there is a curious exception to this trend: the media. If the New York Times and ABC and Knight Ridder are the equivalent of the Wal-Marts and Home Depots, they're getting picked off five, 10, a hundred customers at a time by a gazillion mom 'n' pop outfits -- the Drudge Report, Power Line, realclearpolitics.com and a myriad of other Internet wallahs.
Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, was one of the first of the big-time bloggers -- or, as we old-media bores say, "bloggers." He hung out his shingle in the summer of 2001 as Instapundit.
By Sept. 10, he had some 1,600 readers a day. On Sept. 11, it tripled, and in the weeks after that it soared. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world now dial him up first thing in the morning and throughout the day.
That's a lot fewer than, say, the seven million viewers who tune in to the CBS Evening News. But, on the other hand, professor Reynolds' overheads are less than the budget for Dan Rather's hairdresser. Hurricane Dan recently retired, of course, and his successor, Bob Schieffer, is more modestly coiffed, but it will take more economies than that to negate my point: a guy with a laptop and some friendly emailers from Hollywood to Afghanistan can pull an audience a 10th of the size of a mega-global news operation in a big skyscraper in New York full of thousands of employees with lavish benefits.
Reynolds has now written a book called An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths. It's one of the most enjoyable reads I've had in a long time, not because the author is a great prose stylist but because he's an enthusiast who communicates his enthusiasm very infectiously and effectively. He's one of those guys who, if he gets a yen to do something, just gets on with it. Fifteen years ago, he decided he'd had enough of lousy tasteless American beer, so he decided to brew his own. A few years later, he decided he'd like to start producing albums, so he did. His brother had business that took him to Africa, and had heard some Ugandan band he liked, and there was some Polish company that makes studio-quality software you can download off the Internet, and so a few weeks later he was a record producer. He's not Phil Ramone or Mitch Miller, but on the other hand he's not losing money. And, as he points out, for the boys in the band, when you convert any U.S. dollars into Ugandan shillings it goes a long way.
