This post is in response to a question asked in the Ask Karina thread by eugene: “You referenced this in your “Bagger” post, but what do you think is the future of film blogging? Where is all this going?”

I generally feel uncomfortable predicting the future, but I feel very comfortable diagnosing what’s wrong with the present!

Here is what I wrote about the general state of blogging in my post about the changes at the Carpetbagger blog:

I’m concerned that Oscar blogging has lost its urgency –– as has much of year-round film blogging, as so many of us either waste time bickering amongst ourselves, or piling on the same semi-stories in a desperate quest to chase the traffic that keeps us alive.

Anything of interest currently happening in the film blogosphere is hidden behind a wall of noise. I’m no math wiz, but I’d be willing to hazard a guess that at least 90% of content published on a given day on medium-to-high profile film blogs (that is, any site you’ve actually heard of) falls into one of three categories: 1) reblogged news, often given a snarky/skeptical spin; 2) personal attacks on other bloggers/writers; 3) traffic bait designed to give a mass audience (ie: Google searchers, Digg users) more of what they’ve already proven they like. SpoutBlog has, at times, been guilty of all three of these things, but mostly number 3. Whoops. Sorry.

When I started editing Cinematical in 2005, I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I did have this crazy idea that blogging offered a chance to approach a conversation about movies in a way that felt different from what I was getting as a reader from the existing (mostly print) outlets. In so far as a blog was a legitimate, not un-hostile alternative to the print media, it made sense that people like Peter Bart were vocally against it, and I was fine with that. And then blogging became a business, or at least a lot of people looked at the few money-making frequently-updated publications and tried to replicate their success, and so major media titles (including Variety) jumped into the fray. We’ve now come to the point where most of the interesting, idiosyncratic voices left are drowned out by the noise made from the hundreds of traffic-chasers, who are essentially blaring the same thing, at the same time, all day long. About a year and a half ago, I wouldn’t have been able to get through a day without my Google Reader. A few months ago, I had to abandon my RSS feeds, because every time I opened up Reader I felt like I was being yelled at about the same two or three things, by hundreds of voices in unison who are apparently convinced that if they’re not part of the pile-on, their readers will lose interest.

People keep asking me what I’m going to do after this week, and at this point I have no idea, but if I do know that I’d only be interested in going back to daily blogging if I had the freedom to ignore the received wisdom about what makes a blog a success, and particularly the assumptions as to what kind of content the audience is looking for. As a reader, I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m bored with everything I know I want. I want to be surprised.