Advertisement
Historic news! David Hudson, the master of film blogging behind GreenCine Daily, is leaving that site to start a new blog for IFC. That blog, called The Daily, will launch January 1. Meanwhile, GreenCine Daily will be taken over by Aaron Hillis, freelance writer and co-founder of Benten Films.
Why is this a big deal? In the brief history of the film blogosphere, nobody has ever even tried to aggregate film news and commentary as thoroughly and elegantly as David Hudson. And maybe it’s holiday season fuzzy headed-ness on my part, but the idea that there will soon be two places for me to go for curated bloggy aggregation kind of blows my mind.
In his post on the trasition, Hudson talks about the evolution of blogging (his, ours) and stresses the notion that “community-building” is integral to all of it. One thing our sector of the blogosphere has been notably lacking over the years, as that community has built up, is competition. Which is not to say that I expect Hillis and Hudson to start going after each other like the link blog equivalents of Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee, but it’ll be interesting, for sure, to see how this community evolves with more than one set of eyes and furiously typing fingers combing through the clutter for clarity.
And, of course, there’s the added pressure that with everything I publish, I now have *two* men to try to impress.
Kevin Buist
FLAME + CITRON Review
Christopher Campbell
Happy Halloween Links. Today in Film...
Brandon Harris
5 80s Literary Adaptations Worse Than...
Kevin Kelly
John Krasinski, Brief Interviews With...
Karina Longworth
SpoutBlog, Now Available in Book Form
Paul Moore
October 31, Karina’s Last Day
Lauren Wissot
Sasha Grey Interview
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
Wow..Karina..I couldn’t disagree with you more.
The competition for our attention is ever-increasing. Information is available at a greater frequency, and from more sources than ever before. Those of us who are slaves to our RSS readers can barely keep up. Toss in the time we spend on social networking, Twittering, Tumblring, and of course the old standbys (TV, Film, books, life, etc.) and our time is stretched pretty thin.
Web sites are aggressively opting for the quantity-over-quality model — tracking with careful precision the number of hits per story in hopes that readers return to the site multiple times per day. You yourself are posting more often than you used to. For obvious reasons, this escalation can continue for only so long before everybody tunes out due to superficiality. How much information do we really *need* each day?
What makes GreenCine so wonderful is David’s curatorial ability. If you read no other film site each day, you’d have a very healthy understanding of what’s going on in the film world. On top of that, the site’s refusal to engage in gossip and/or snark is what makes reading the site that much more enjoyable.
In my opinion, the last thing this sector of the blogosphere needs right now is competition, and I don’t feel that’s what David had in mind when he spoke of “community building.” The reason we look to other sites is for the voice of the writer(s) we enjoy reading — for their critical opinion, assessment, etc. I don’t need to read on six different sites that director X is remaking film Y.
I can’t speak for Aaron, but I don’t think it’s his intention to compete with David, or to simply duplicate content. Your final sentence seems to imagine otherwise. To whose advantage is it if both David and Aaron link to your pieces?
Yes, Aaron has a challenge ahead of him, but he’s a terrific, personable writer, and I’m sure he’s going to bring that to the site, and turn it into something that complements David’s (and others’) rather than compete with it.
Filmbrain, I didn’t mean to suggest that the “competition” aspect is a bad thing. And the last sentence was clearly a joke. At least, I meant it to be.
Also, this is a quibble, but I’m actually posting less than I ever have, in part because I feel like I have to think a lot harder than I used to in order to have anything to say.