Oh, Max…

First, the links:

Max, 19, Hits The Road
In which our hero starts to blog his gap year in Thailand on the Guardian website.
Travel editor’s response to yesterday’s blog
In which said travel editor attempts to justify why Max was blogging on the Guardian website.
The week that was
In which the mighty Emily Bell goes all meta.
Hate mail hell of a gap-year blogger
In which the Observer, bizarrely, treats this as a news story.
Wayne Type, 19, hits the road
In which Teh Internets provide the inevitable yet somewhat entertaining parody.

I’m a bit late to this partly because I wanted to see how it would play out and partly because I just didn’t get around to it yesterday, but there are a few interesting things to draw out of it.

The nepotism charge is, I think, misplaced. Sure, Max got the job (if he’s even getting paid for it) based on who he knew but that’s generally how most of these things happen. There’s nothing inherently wrong with networking to get opportunites, especially in the media. Sure, it’s distasteful but it doesn’t really mean anything.

What’s more interesting is the context. When something appears under the Guardian logo – or indeed the logo of any major media outlet – you expect a certain quality. This doesn’t mean you expect it to be of high quality but there are expectations. For example, I expect something on Ain’t It Cool News to be written in a juvenile OTT manner so having something written by, say, Leonard Maltin on there would just be wrong. Similarly a rounded and sensible article on the social internet on The Register would confuse the hell out me.

The Guardian’s biggest mistake was transplanting the sort of blog that thousands of traveling teens write onto their pages and thinking it would work. These sorts of blogs aren’t intended for a huge readership. They’re written for the friends of the bloggers and to those readers they’re the fantastic. To everyone else they’re anodyne self-indulgent rubbish. And the thing is that doesn’t devalue them in the slightest.

I read someone recently talking about YouTube and how big media producers get it terribly wrong when they dismiss the millions of videos on there as being rubbish. To the five or ten people they’re aimed at they’re not rubbish – they’re genius. They went on to make the point that those five or ten people are watching this stuff instead of the big media products because they have a connection with it – that’s it’s authentic in a way stuff on the BigTube can’t be. (Can’t find the link right now but I’ll try again later.)

Max’s blog was deeply authentic to his friends and family, which is why they’re so upset by the reaction. But to everyone else it was bollocks. Both opinions are right. That post was the textual equivalent of sitting behind a bunch of annoying teenagers on a train. The teenagers think what they’re talking about is vital and important – the rest of us wish they’d shut the fuck up about their holidays.

That said, you wouldn’t be to surprised to find this sort of stuff in the paper itself, buried away as filler in section 7 of the Sunday edition. But online the hierarchy is self selecting thanks to the power of the inbound link. The Guardian can try to set the agenda on how it’s content is viewed but ultimately it has no say in what’s considered important. The readers will decide that through email, IM, blogs, Facebook, etc. This is a great thing, of course, but it also means you’ve got to be careful. Nothing happens in obscurity anymore, especially if you want it to.

But ultimately this was an error in register. The editor thought that since teens were blogging about their trips abroad they would like to read the blog of a teen on a trip abroad. What he didn’t ask was why people might be interested in reading Max’s blog. Why should I listen to him? Here’s some reasons I can think of.

1) I know Max. Not just in the sense that I’ll be generous to his literary failing but that I’ll understand where he’s coming from and be able to put his views into some context.

2) Someone who knows Max has recommended I read his blog because I hope to do what he’s doing. The personal recommendation by a mutual acquaintance is very powerful.

3) Max has built up a reputation as a good travel blogger. Bing! Let me expand on that one a bit.

Sure, anyone can start a blog. That’s the beauty of them. And most blogs will have a tiny audience because that’s all they were intended to have. Most bloggers don’t want to be “successful” – success to them is having a conversation with a few readers and other bloggers. They don’t want to talk to thousands of people.

The central charge of nepotism isn’t really to do with Max’s Dad being a freelance journo or whatever – it’s to do with the Guardian giving someone a platform who demonstrably didn’t deserve it. Not because of his writing skills but because he hadn’t earned his spurs, as it were. They were setting him up as an authority figure when his authority was seriously lacking. If he had an archive of work online with plenty of inbound links and a nice little community then, yes, you could justify giving him a blog. It might even work well, encouraging him to improve his style in a more challenging environment. Indeed, figuring out how to write a travel blog in a way that isn’t chronically boring to anyone who doesn’t know you would be a good challenge.

So what would I have done? Given that there are plenty of teens blogging their gap year in 3rd world countries I’d task a journalist with monitoring them, with permission of course. Ask 20 or so of them if they’d be willing for excerpts to be posted on the Guardian’s travel blog once a week in a roundup. Keep it light and dilute the inevitable hate from the Guardian’s noxious commenting community by spreading it across a wider number of bloggers from different backgrounds. That’s the sort of thing a newspaper blog should be doing.

Credit to Si before it went viral.