Extraordinary Art Blogs Series, Part seven: It is not Really Bloggers vs. Journalists, You Know

See Bioephemera’s art blog profile, visit the Bioephemera blog.

In the latest of our series of interviews with extraordinary art bloggers, we will explore what the future has in store for art writing on the internet.

I am pleased to be joined by Jessica Palmer, who produces Bioephemera, for this discussion. For those of you who do not already know Jessica, she is a biologist and artist. She received her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology from UC Berkeley, and was one of the founders of the Berkeley Science Review. Having taught at a state college, Jessica is currently focused on science policy and communications.

In preparing for this interview, Jessica and I first decided to agree some terminology, which we will use throughout our conversation:

• Content, information provided through any media
• Mainstream media, non-specialist news coverage characterized by national/international presence
• Traditional media, any media widely used before the internet really took off, which we choose to date as 1994 when the Netscape Navigator web browser was launched
• Emerging media, web and mobile ‘phone originated and communicated media
• Media convergence, the long-term convergence of all digital media onto an internet based platform

We also got to talking about the major trends that are shaping what people will be reading and viewing, and listening to in the future. In very broad terms, we decided that five key trends define the marketplace right now:

1. Media convergence will continue to improve consumer choice, providing a better match between desire and availability.

2. Content producers are just that. Consumers care less about how and where they can get the content they want. What they do consistently care about is the quality of the content, and whether the content is produced to their timescales.

3. The content producer-to-content consumer relationship is changing. Requests for feedback and further debate have been partially overtaken by things like Twitter Tweet conversations, and further fragmentation will certainly occur.

4. Information technology and systems, provided as commodity (pay-as-you-go) services. Such services range from processing and storage, through to credit card processing and super-fast content delivery.

5. The economic downturn.

It is the challenges and likely opportunities these trends point to that Jessica and I decided to focus on during our conversation.

Peter Cowling (Art Connect)
People may be wondering about the title Bioephemera. How did you decide on the title, and what does it mean?

JP
It’s what Lewis Carroll calls a “portmanteau” word. I wanted a name that was both scientific and whimsical, because I saw my blog as a balance between those two impulses. “Bio” was easy – I’m a biologist – and I settled on “ephemera” because it captured something fundamental about the transient, always-changing nature of a blog.

For me, the word “ephemeral” draws a lot of significant ideas together: it describes records like diaries or almanacs, the precursors of blogs; cultural artifacts like posters and advertisements; and short-lived species, like insects, that figure prominently in my artwork. There’s a lot of wonderful, ephemeral art and design that will never make it into a museum’s permanent collection, like ads or T-shirts or graffiti or digital art. The art ecosystem, like the biological ecosystem, is always changing, dying, being redefined. I thought the word “bioephemera” reflected that dynamic.

PC
You were an editor at the launch of the successful Berkeley Science Review, back in Spring 2001. Was it a pretty natural decision to start a blog?

JP
The two projects actually had very different motivations. We founded the BSR to give science graduate students an opportunity to practice communications skills that aren’t taught in traditional science curricula. Although it had a web presence, it was primarily a print journal and educational initiative. I think we all felt a printed journal would be more credible – at least at the time. If we started it today, the BSR would probably be a blog, if only because it’s so much cheaper to do.

Although I’ve continued to work in science education, communication, and policy, I started BioE for myself. It was primarily a place to post my own artwork and develop nascent thoughts about the interface of art and neuroscience. Initially I thought the blog would give me an impetus to be more artistically productive, but it quickly took on a life of its own. I stumbled into a niche that didn’t have much online coverage at the time – sciart, medical illustration, etc. The next thing you know, I found a community of readers and like-minded colleagues, like Christopher Reiger at Hungry Hyaena, Pam Grossman at Phantasmaphile, and Joanne Ebenstein at Morbid Anatomy. I’ve enjoyed being part of that online community so much, I’ve let my artistic side lapse for the time being so I can focus on the blogging – which is not at all what I originally intended!

PC
The typical coverage of art in the mainstream media runs to advocacy journalism, reviews and critique, the odd modern-art-is-rubbish piece, and reporting record auction results.

Unless they find some new opportunities, my feeling is that this will actually be reduced to the last two elements, perhaps supplemented by the occasional top 10/50/100 etc. list thrown in. How do you see the situation?

JP
I think you’re right that art journalism is a niche market, and traditional opportunities in that area may be shrinking with the rest of traditional media. But I see topical interfaces – like art-meets-science, or “sciart” – as potential opportunities for art coverage to reach new audiences.

I find that people enjoy looking at science through the lens of art – it gives them a new perspective on something they take for granted. I think a lot of people out there want art and culture to be part of their lives, but don’t feel any connection with the rarefied gallery scene or the high-priced auction market. They want to see art as it relates to their lives, their health, and the technologies they use every day.

Now, whether this kind of interdisciplinary arts coverage is something the arts community and art critics will find satisfying and meaningful is another issue entirely. But it can’t be worse than top 10/50/100 lists, can it?

PC
No, it cannot be worse.

Along these lines, I can also see that something like a painting or photograph or the day could take-off for websites. I mean, you could not do that with newspapers, because the quality is just too low, but it would work on the web. The established quality daily image blogs are amazingly popular, so I would expect some newspaper to pick this idea up sooner or later.

That said, I think we are agreeing here that mainstream media might niche into various aspects of art, but that we also see no evidence that they will be evolve into a place that art lovers are going to get their fill of content anytime soon.

With that in mind, let’s consider the specialist providers – those who are more focused on art.

First, it seems to me that for almost every type of specialist who has moved to the internet from traditional media, there is an equivalent who started out on the internet.

JP
I agree. I know several examples of writers who have leveraged a successful blog to obtain a book deal, or moved from online art followings to real-world marketing.

PC
Okay so, second, there is little appreciable difference between the experience you get visiting traditional media websites vs. blogs, especially blog collectives like Scienceblogs. From the user perspective, traditional media companies are incorporating things like comments facilities, and generally becoming more blog-like. From an information technology perspective, the underlying code of blog platforms has been refined to the extent that individuals can do anything a large media outlet can do – albeit that things like video streaming take some thought if you do not want to go down the YouTube route.

By far the biggest difference, then, seems to be that the traditional media organizations include full-time employees, and therefore accrue a certain level of overhead, whereas art bloggers only ever get paid if they hit profit generation related targets. At face value, this is not exactly a competitive advantage.

Purely in terms of providing written content, what can those with overheads do to differentiate themselves from those without?

JP
This is actually the basis of a big debate right now in the science blogosphere: what do mainstream media outlets and traditional journalists offer their readers that independent bloggers don’t? It turns out that the blog model is a pretty natural fit for scientists, because the scientific community respects individual expertise and sees dialogue between researchers as part of the scientific process. I can see it being a good fit for the arts community for similar reasons.

Some vocal science bloggers are so frustrated by the scientific inaccuracies in popular science reporting, they don’t have much respect for the mainstream media any more. However, I think that mainstream journalism can still make several important contributions. For one thing, it’s independent – or strives to be. Although it can be frustrating, it’s healthy to have non-scientists looking in on the scientific community and interpreting what we are doing from a non-scientific perspective. For another, it’s interdisciplinary. There are a lot of science blogs, but most of them focus on pretty tight niches, like neurobiology or microbiology. Art blogs also tend to have niches, just like galleries. Insofar as big, traditional media outlets reflect the expertise of many contributors, they can help you get out of your personal comfort zone or echo chamber, and expose you to different frames of reference.

PC
Anyhow, one opportunity I can see is that of providing content to mobile devices. I can see that this area has a lot of opportunity in general, and I can see it for certain areas in art. I can see a lot of benefit in being able to background information before viewing some art, for example. What do you think?

JP
I think mobile devices are a huge market for content, and only going to get bigger. The capability of mobile devices to display high-quality graphics and video has really changed things – you really can read an art blog on an iPhone now.

I have heard two general takes on mobile media: one is that it doesn’t really matter what device you are using, because consumers want the same content on their mobile as they do on their desktop. So desktop technology and mobile technology are converging. The other perspective is that the ability of mobile devices to supply what you need on the fly, in the gallery or the museum, for example, is going to sustain a different kind of mobile technology. There could be a lot of opportunities there. Already there are many apps that customize the information you receive to your location. For example, you can envision a gallery pushing a preview of their artists to your phone as you walk by. Imagine a version of Urbanspoon (the iPhone app that lists restaurants in your immediate area) customized for the Chelsea galleries, or for DC’s Artomatic – but instead of restaurant reviews, you have art reviews. It could be a lot of fun.

PC
Yes, I think you are right there. The most compelling reason for content on a mobile device occurs when you have some sort of location-based need. Beyond those sort of requirements, people really want what I would call phased content – that is to say content that can be viewed to varying degrees of detail, depending on the time the viewer has available. I think both these demand and supply side are, at best, embryonic in the art world, and expect we will see a lot of change in the next three-to-five years.

Another technology-driven opportunity is high quality video. For me this would mean: recognizing that writing for the media differs from for newspaper columns or even audio; better acting or some direction; and better produced output. I can see mainstream media pushing ahead with these things for the core of their business – subjects like sport, gossip, politics, etc. Art seems unlikely to get much attention until these priority areas have been addressed. So, it seems likely that some art specialists, or a born-on-the-web organisation, such as Bad at Sports could emerge as the big winner. Do you think that mainstream media will be focused enough on a subject like art to fend off potential upstarts?

JP
I’m not sure big media should be trying to fend off upstarts. Web 2.0 is like an ecosystem – there’s a lot of room for players of different sizes, a lot of niches. But I do think big media needs to be more creative if they want to maintain their clout. I recently saw a post at Nieman Journalism Lab complaining about the lack of creativity in the big outlets, that they were leaving innovations up to other providers – like Google’s news trends function, which allows you to view coverage of a topic over time. I completely agree. The big outlets aren’t innovating, and I think they lose credibility when they’re behind the technological curve.

PC
I think the problem here is that all the big media corporations do not work cooperatively. In all cases, the separate arms of the organization compete against each other for people’s attention, as well as their competitors, and do so on the basis that they have to hit short term profit goals. It is no surprise to me that one of the better examples is the BBCs coverage of the Formula 1 motorsport. I am not really interested in the sport, but was interested to see their website pulling together things like video coverage with radio commentary, and a system where race standings are automatically pushed out to the user i.e. without them needing to refresh the browser. In the scheme of things, this is no big deal, but the BBC has done these things in a way that people with pretty low specification computers and internet connections can take part.

For me, this points to a whole range of opportunities for the smaller, more focused organization, and some issues for the larger ones. That said, is it all doom and gloom for the big players?

JP
As coverage of niche topics like art and science is being cut right and left, it’s tempting to make dire predictions that mainstream media is becoming a wasteland of paparazzi photos and fluff pieces. I certainly don’t see mainstream media becoming art-centric anytime soon. But the good news is that for a significant number of media outlets, arts and culture are already part of their identity. If they want to maintain the loyalty of their reader community, arts and culture coverage is non-negotiable. Consider providers like the New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, etc. Art may not be their focus, but they have a strong identity as culturally engaged sources. Readers respond to and value that identity.

There’s a reason that I’ve maintained a paid subscription to the New Yorker for ten years, including grad school, when I probably should have used that money for other things. I identify with their philosophy, and am willing to pay a premium to be part of their community of readers. I’m also more likely to seek out their content and be a part of their community online. I stumble across new sources of media content every day via links or search engines, but only those sources for which I feel a real affinity end up on my feed reader. I only go back to the sources that “click” with me as a reader.

PC
I think that is completely true. Certainly, there is so much content on the web that people will only ever decide to revisit a very small percentage of sites. What is the key to making a site stand out and fostering that sort of relationship with your visitors?

JP
Maintaining a unique personality that appeals to and defines an enthusiastic readership is more important than ever for outlets with an online presence. Otherwise, you simply can’t compete with a news aggregator like Google News. I think art, design, and culture are becoming increasingly important in forging unique corporate identities in which readers feel personally invested. SEED, for example, is a younger print publication that leverages a strong design component and a lively blog community to create a unique identity among science magazines. Even in this economy, there are brand-new publications, like the art/culture/fashion mag Coilhouse, which bills itself as “a love letter to alternative culture.” It’s too early to know if Coilhouse will be successful, but I think they have it exactly right: readers will be loyal to, and pay a premium for, outlets that share their passions.

PC
Taking in the conversation so far, we expect to see a lot of change over a relatively short period of time. With that sort of change, there is a risk that we end up loosing something.

The Fourth Estate envisages public benefits that can only be delivered when a trained journalist, works in harness with editors etc. could produce. I see no evidence that these ideals are being generally maintained, and I am not sure that they are even matter for a reasonable amount of content produced on art blogs. At the same time, I can see that there are opportunities to adopt, and perhaps even improve on, the practices the best art journalists adopt – perhaps taking a cue from science writers. To what extent do you believe journalistic principles are important?

JP
Journalistic principles are very important. I’m not a cynic who thinks good journalism is dead or impossible to do – I’ve blogged before about my belief that journalists should strive to be factual, accurate, and as unbiased as possible (given that we all have innate human biases in how we see the world). The values important to good journalism overlap closely with the values we have as scientists, academics, and teachers, and are the same values I try to follow on my blog.

Unfortunately, journalistic ideals are demonstrably not being maintained everywhere. Many of my fellow bloggers, including Bora Zivkovic, argue that science journalists are among the worst offenders! But the very fact that we are so disappointed and angry when journalists do shoddy work means we still have some expectations of value and merit from journalism.

On the other hand, it’s unclear what expectations we have from blogs. Some people see bloggers on an equal footing with journalists. Yet bloggers aren’t journalists. It’s not just that they’re untrained, or that they don’t have editors. More disturbingly, there is very little transparency about how they are paid or by whom. I know of one influential blogger who was given a car, and others who were given valuable electronic equipment, with the expectation that they would regularly endorse these products to their readership. That’s fine as long as the readers are aware of what’s going on. But right now, the blogosphere is too diverse to have well-defined mores or codes of conduct. I wish we were more like journalists in having some baseline expectations of objectivity, especially when it comes to reviews of things like consumer products (including art).

PC
I think that journalists, and especially editors, have received gifts of some sort or another over the years. Motoring journalists, for example, are encouraged to take large discounts, to provide favourable reviews or face loosing out on scoops, go on hospitality days and so on. So I do think it is a problem, I think it is a general problem, and there should be more disclosure. However, I also think that there is an answer. People’s tolerance for interference is like elasticity in pricing. Throw in more advertising, political views, product placement etc. than your readers will tolerate, and they leave.

JP
You make a good point – traditional journalism is hardly incorruptible! I guess the main thing that bothers me about the blogosphere is that the huge diversity of blog formats and styles often leaves readers uncertain if what they are getting is authentic, while the proliferation of content sources means one is less likely to revisit individual sources often enough to develop long-term familiarity and trust. This is a bigger problem for the arts than for science, because art criticism and art journalism have a powerful subjective component. If you don’t trust a critic’s eye and experience, then his or her opinion has no more value to you than a perfect stranger’s opinion, or one of the hundreds of reader reviews at Amazon.com.

PC
Nicely put. I had not followed that particular line of thinking before, but I do agree with you when you put it like that.

I suppose this leads us nicely to the question of money. I doubt that even the most successful art bloggers rely too much on any income their blogs generate, and quite a few out there generate none. The primary interest for bloggers would be promoting themselves in the context of the things they do as ‘day jobs’, such as artist, art dealer, guest speaker, journalist, etc. Bloggers do also promote themselves as collectors, and some write simply because they enjoy doing so (John Haber over at the New.York.Art.Crit art blog being an example).

I can see that the people who want to use their blog as a place that friends, family, collectors, and others that they refer to it, are well placed continuing to go operate their own blogs. For those who are interested in getting more people interested in art, on the one side, or those who would like to make some/more money from their blogging, on the other, I can see the benefit of working under a collaborative banner. Having had a successful blog of your own, and then moved to scienceblogs.com, how do you see this consideration?

JP
I moved to scienceblogs.com because I thought it was important to have arts/culture dialogue in the science blogosphere and to promote crosspollination between blog niches. I actually lost some traffic, at least at first. Maybe some of my non-science readership wrote me off as just another science blogger! Anyway, I make a negligible amount of money from bioephemera. The biggest perk is having my bandwidth subsidized, and knowing that a big uptick in traffic driven by a link from an influential source like Andrew Sullivan or Boing Boing won’t crash my blog.

I don’t see myself ever becoming a fulltime blogger. It just doesn’t fit my style of blogging. But for bloggers who do want to generate the kind of traffic to support themselves financially, look to the big blogs as a model. Monitor and respond to trending news rapidly. Post to your blog often. Let your readers help generate the content of your blog – let them submit links and content to you. Maximize reader loyalty by developing a strong voice; controversial or polarized political positions translate into huge traffic (although a polarized position poses problems vis-a-vis the journalistic objectivity we discussed earlier). I think it would be quite possible for someone with the right personality to develop a huge following as an art blogger. It’s all about monetizing your personality.

PC
Speaking of monetization, content monetization was a big thing in information technology circles back in about 2003-04. Three options exist, none of which are great in their present form:

• Advertising
• Subscription
• Cross-sell i.e. free content allied to income generating products or services

People have mooted new models, such as very low cost web transactions. The idea here would be people, say, pay 1 cent for some content. The problem has been:

• It costs more than 1 cent to process credit cards
• There is no standard pay-as-you-go transaction model for the web, so you cannot pay for 1,000 transactions up-front
• How do you build in anti-fraud and some form of content protection into what still remains, transaction-by-transaction, 1 cent of income

Still, at this level, or using the daily/monthly/yearly subscription read-whatever-we-have-on-the-site model, it seems possible that these problems can be resolved.

How do you see these different options in relation to art? Is there more opportunity to look at cross-selling and subscriptions? Would something like low cost transactions be a game changer?

JP
I can’t speak to the economic details of these transaction models, but you are right that it’s a real challenge to monetize content, especially with the technology constantly changing underneath you. The most successful art/blog partnerships I’ve seen have involved promoting art sales and generating profit that way, rather than generating profit from monetizing content about art.

I was recently at a talk where someone observed that with the iPhone, people are willing to purchase applications that they wouldn’t be willing to pay for on their desktop. Basically, the iPhone enabled the monetization of apps that wouldn’t have otherwise been sellable. Part of this is the novelty of a new platform, but part of it is context: my needs are different in different situations. I play sudoku on my iPhone on the train, but never at home, so I want sudoku on my iPhone but not my laptop. It’s essential to consider the context of content. Readers and consumers are willing to pay to be part of a community they identify with, to have instant access to customized content when and where they need it, and to access different types of content in different situations. So I don’t think there is a one-size-fits-all model for monetization.

PC
It is not just producing content that is valuable: our attention matters too. Attention in the context of selling adverts or cross-selling is of obvious importance in business terms, but there is a wider trend that I think deserves some consideration – the demand for better quality conversations. I have seen this stand out most at the two extremes the desire for quick opinion sharing, and the need to build more detailed, perspectives over time.

I can see services like twitter soaking-up a fair bit of news coverage, but less so for art. Maybe for things like gallery openings and art fairs, but not to the extent that citizens-on-the-scene could take off elsewhere.

I think the bigger deal could lie in the evolution of comments facilities. For example, a process whereby the results of individual conversations build up into a consensus opinion would be very useful. The option to have more control over a comments facility, based on trust, or the media type of the content, or the subject matter, would also be welcomed, I think.

How do you think the produce –> attention –> respond/produce-again circle will move forward in broad terms? Do you see the same or any different specific gaps that are not that either not well served by technology or are yet to be adopted appropriately by users?

JP
This is a huge question. Twitter has vocal advocates and detractors, but let’s face it, it is not a medium for carrying on a conversation. Comments on blogs are better, but they aren’t set up to enable really meaningful discussions – they can be interrupted by trolls or off-topic comments, and they’re hard to read through. And no one keeps up with their email anymore. Basically, there hasn’t been any technology that really gives you the power to match the quality of a personal conversation.

What I’d like to see, and where I think the Web is going, is toward integrating all of these capabilities more seamlessly on your browser. When you have one dialogue at your blog on one post, another conversation at a different blog, not to mention a dialogue on Twitter, and a different dialogue in email, managing the content of your own life becomes totally unwieldy. There needs to be a better way to integrate these services so monitoring, updating, and maintaining them doesn’t become too much of a drain. I’m not talking about something like Friendfeed, which lets you aggregate updates from multiple services into a single feed, but something even more responsive and dynamic, that gives you, as you mentioned, more control over how things are shared and with whom. I’m not sure what that would look like, but I won’t be surprised if we see find out in a few years.

The biggest challenge to getting good content out there is the difficulty of filtering the wheat from the chaff. We hear about stories and videos going viral all the time, but often these viral sensations have been hovering just under the collective consciousness for some time, waiting to be discovered and spotlighted on a blog or a social bookmark service. We know that on the internet, just as in the art world, a low profile does not mean low quality; the converse is also true. The problem is that a lot of people, myself included, feel saturated already trying to keep up with monitoring our feeds. The proliferation of content sources on the internet means you could literally spend 24 hours a day doing nothing but reading and sharing new content – not adding to it, not pondering it, not generating synthesis. It’s not enough to create good content, you have to promote it and market it. That can easily take the bulk of your time!

I think people would embrace more automated but reliable and personalized ways of filtering the information we want from the information we don’t. As you said, our attention is valuable, and it is stretched to the breaking point right now by the demands of these technologies.

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