The Year of the Blog, Part II

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After dominating cyberspace the past few weeks, the controversy over the (in)famous djmontano blog has spilled over into local TV, radio, and print.

Korina Sanchez devoted an entire episode of her TV show Korina Today on ANC to the subject. ABS-CBN was able to get their Australian correspondent do an exclusive interview with blogger Brian Gorrel. He was featured on both the early evening TV Patrol and the late evening Bandila newscasts just the night before. Radio station Magic 89.9 FM got him on air. And the Inquirer had him on the front page.

It takes a phenomenon like this to get people’s attention to emerging trends. Not that the Internet needed any further help from traditional media. The djmontano site alone has generated millions of pageviews – establishing an audience far greater than most traditional media channels. There are more people reading this blog than any issue of the biggest selling newspaper.

But is this all there is to it? After the dust has settled, and the fervor – or should I say furor – has died down, what will blogs be like? Will everyone forget about it and go back to their lives the way it was before? What does history teach us about phenomena like this?

We do know that technology changes lives. And we also know that life imitates art (if this passes for art, of course). So what consequence can we expect from all this?

Let’s look at television as a parallel. There was a time when TV viewing started sometime in the late mornings, picked up over lunch, slowed down again in the afternoon, and picked up again towards evening primetime. There was no such thing as early morning TV. And then the first Gulf War happened. Operation Desert Shield, and eventually Desert Storm, stormed into our living rooms, dining rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms (or wherever it was that we placed our TV sets) in the early hours of the morning, as CNN made itself a household word across the globe with its up to the minute coverage of the war that was raging over the skies of Kuwait.

It woke us up. It got us out of bed. It got us out of our comfort zones as we turned on our TV sets early in the morning to catch the latest happenings in the Persian Gulf. It also woke up network executives. ABS-CBN and GMA-7 both saw what was happening. A new time slot was being created right before their eyes. And soon enough, Alas Singko Y Media (ASYM) was born, the very first early morning program on local television. GMA-7 soon came up with Unang Hirit (UH). ASYM became Magandang Umaga Bayan (MUB) as it reacted to the challenge posed by GMA-7’s UH, eventually becoming Umagang Kay Ganda (UKG), as ABS-CBN continues to reprogram and reformat it, a consequence of tough competition coming from GMA-7.

Today of course we look at early morning TV as a matter of course. A phenomenon called the first Gulf War created a profitable new viewership for local early morning television.

You can spell profitable with a capital “P” there. If you just bother to count how many commercial spots get aired every single morning during these shows then you will know that a lot of money is changing hands every single morning that you as a televiewer is giving these networks your sufferance.

Will the djmontano blog create a whole new audience of netizens? People who prefer to go online and read about other people’s lives – as opposed to watching telenovelas? Or listening to radio soap operas? Or reading the society columns of Johnny Litton and Maurice Arcache?

What’s the difference between reading the djmontano blog and watching The Buzz or Star Talk? They both feature other people’s sordid lives. They both feature celebrities. They are both filled with unpleasant newsbits about the people they feature.

The difference is that the traditional counterparts of blogs are profitable enterprises, while Brian Gorrel’s blog is not. I was one of the guests in Korina’s TV show when she featured the djmontano blog, and she asked me, “Is there an appetite for stuff like this?” I said, undeniably, yes.

Soap operas on radio are called that precisely because they were originally fully sponsored by the laundry soap brands. Telenovelas and the weekend showbiz talk shows have high ratings and consequently many advertisers. Not only do we have columns, and TV and radio shows dedicated to chismis [gossip], there is even a highly saleable tabloid that calls itself Pinoy Parazzi – it features showbiz chismis from cover to cover. A popular magazine version is also a best-seller: Star Studio.

What am I saying?

Sooner or later, somebody will find a way to transform the blog into a profitable enterprise.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions advanced in this article is the author’s own, and may not necessarily represent the views and opinions of THE LOBBYiST, its editors, or its publishers.

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