Don’t be a hack, be a “brand”

Here’s an interesting piece in the New York Observer about the growing trend towards journalists becoming “brands”.

According to the piece, gone is the “journalistic culture in which columnists were the only ones allowed to have a personality, and everyone else’s bylines were practically interchangeable”.

Not too long ago only the giants of the mainstream media world—the Tom Wolfes and the Joan Didions—were bona fide media personalities. It was a class you aspired to, and few reached. Someone, usually Esquire, was always there to cut the likes of Gay Talese a fat check, and Tom Wolfe’s adoption of the trademark white suit was hardly an accident—it was a deliberate extension of Tom Wolfe, the brand.

That was before anyone with a blog and a Flickr account could burrow into a writerly niche and, if all went according to plan, come out burnished by the soft glow of Internet fame. The days when a writer actually had to have a body of significant work in print to be famous are over. Now, a sort of equivalency gets established between Tom Wolfe and … Perez Hilton?

The hypothesis is that, as a reporter, you have to “brand” yourself (in other words, get your name out there as an individual, rather than a tool of your publication) before it’s too late. Rather than work for your newspaper or other old media publication and be happy with it, you have to create a “Me Inc.”, as the author Tom Peters calls it.

There are some good points here but I’m not sure we’ve quite reached this level in the UK. There are, of course, local newspaper websites where the idea of “journo-blogging” (if I can call it that) is catching on. But I don’t think we’ve had many, if any, high profile examples of popular bloggers getting hired by the Guardian, Times, et al.

In fact, there are swathes of the old media that don’t seem to have much appetite for this kind of personalisation. I suspect there is a cultural factor at work as well. Whereas the “Me, Inc” thing goes down a treat in the land of the American dream, the majority of British publications, I suspect, would find the idea of bigging up a reporter as a “brand” as crass, bordering on laughable.

Which means that although there are some obvious places, such as the Guardian’s Comment is Free, that seem to be ahead of the curve in allocating a personal platform to relatively lesser known writers, the idea that columnists should be the only ones to get picture bylines seems to persist quite widely in the UK.

Spotted via fckblog.

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