Ok, so go read this statement from Magnum Photo’s blog. The gist of it is, they aren’t blogging for the foreseeable future, and might not blog ever again. The reason they give is that blogs aren’t a good platform for quality content. It’s offensive and wrong-headed, to say the least. Even if/when they do come back, if it’s as several blogs or as one feed, if the focus becomes more about dialogue than content, I think they’re missing something big.


To say that blogs aren’t a good place for quality content is ignorant and misinformed. (Links go to rebuttal examples.Also this). Those are all blogs, all that I’ve come across recently; there are countless sources of good content on the web, places that have really brilliant content, displayed well. The last one is a community effort, and in fact arose because of a group of people looking for a place. So, to shut down a blog to build a community seems silly. Why not blog the process of making the new site?


Why aren’t the photographers of Magnum, surely some of the world’s finest visual storytellers, blogging themselves? (With the notable exception of David Allen Harvey, who runs Burn magazine, of course). It’d be the best group blog ever, if they would embrace a little technology; the best eyes in the world, reporting daily what they see. From the perspective of one who does it, who has done it now for going on two years (with a little hiatus between the end of the santa fe blog and the start of this one), it’s not hard at all to knock out a blog post a day, sometimes two or three. Especially if all it consists of are photos with captions. Every other day is even easier; even when I was working full time at a job that had nothing to do with my photography, I still did that.


I guess part of the problem is that to get a group of photographers to do anything together is something like herding cats; if you’ve ever walked in a city with even four or five of us you know what I’m talking about; it takes two or three times as long to get somewhere (even dinner) because the whole group sort of wanders off after a picture, and then the rest have to wait, and by the time the one gets back someone else has wandered off. Now imagine a group like that, all self-interested, agreeing to do something like a group blog, to share space on the web with anyone else?


Thinking that way is really wrong-headed. Separate channels for each photographer presume that each one is doing enough to hold a reader’s interest indefinitely, and that readers of one photographer won’t be interested in others. It’s silly. The truth is, group blogs of like minded people (or at least people who are all talking about the same things) usually have more readers and better content than single author blogs. Think LAist, BoingBoing, or blogs like that. The rising tide lifts all boats. And, because there are other people out there doing the same thing in the same space, you’re apt to learn and improve your own content as time goes on.


Of course, nobody listens to me, or at least nobody at Magnum.

Posted by Matt on 2009-07-30T00:00:00Z GMT