This idea has been percolating in the back of my mind for a while, and then I read Skip’s post about Sarah Gibson and NHPR. In it, Skip notes that the “journalist” tried to contact people named in the story but not Skip.
He also notes that Sarah (or her editor) could not bring themself to name the blog site she references when describing who he is. That’s common.
From time to time, the media is forced to notice us, but only as some deformed red-headed step-child who escaped the basement prison and popped up unexpectedly at the “party.”
Oh, my, it’s Ruprecht, the Monkey boy!
This institutional discrimination amongst “journalists,” paid scribes, reporters even, is a source of endless amusement. It’s the “we don’t want to name them because it might give them some credibility” schtick, or it might drive traffic to their website.
I can see why they wouldn’t want to do the latter. We consistently get more online traffic than they do—all of them. Every print media site pretending to do journalism in NH gets less online traffic than GraniteGrok.com.
In other words, as far as Google, Moz, or Alexa are concerned, linking to us gives them credibility, but they can’t bring themselves to do it. We are the website that shall not be named.
As I said, I’m amused.
And it’s been mulling about in my brain matter for a while.
How have we managed, with no payroll, to be of more value, to more people, than these franchises of million-dollar media companies?
Credibility, indeed.
