I had a listen to Damien, Suzy and Val on the Tubridy show earlier. And I have to say, I felt embarrassed for Mr Tubridy.
Last time I checked the year was 2009.
But it was as if Tubridy was in 2004 or 2005 and blogging was still all new and shiny. I was asked similar questions on radio shows four years ago. In fact over the years I’ve been asked to go on the radio and explain what blogging is a few times, and once even on television with Richard and Mick and others.
And the questions were understandable back then, blogging was in its infancy, and it was right to pose some of those questions. But even back then the questions weren’t near as juvenile as Tubridy’s rather uneducated questions. Blogging has moved on since the early days, as has the internet.
Blogging, especially in the US because it really started there, has matured immensely. All of the top political journals and magazines, national daily papers, weeklies… almost everything, uses daily updated blogs to engage with their readers. Because it’s a no brainer. Just like it’s a no brainer for George Hook to engage with listeners on Twitter. And just like it’s a no brainer for Tubridy to engage with his listeners and viewers, if he understood it.
But Tubridy goes back to the usual silly questions despite blogging having evolved and moved on, leaving Tubridy behind. He simply doesn’t get it, it really is that simple. And I have to wonder, if he hasn’t got it by now, will he ever get it? Will he always be scared of the internets?
Damien, Suzy and Val did a good job not rising to what seemed to me to be rather silly attempts at creating controversy where there is none.
Comments
10 responses to “Tubridy and blogging”
I did not hear the show, but the same criticism is made elsewhere. However, to play devil’s advocate, was Tubridy not asking the questions that his less computer literate audience might find helpful to have asked?
In my experience, one of the real problems with specialists (especiallly technology based ones) is that they consistently fail to appreciate the level of understanding of their audience that they are speaking to. A good interviewer will have a much keener sense for who his audience is and therefore try to bridge the gap.
I know plenty of peers who would have no more than a loose grasp of social media beyond Facebook, Bebo, etc., never mind those for whom computers are an alien territory altogether. Accordingly, while their popularity is spreading, I would be far from proclaiming their ubiquity within the public consciousness just yet and especially within the sub-set who regularly dials into Radio 1 in the morning.
It’s a basic of being a TV or radio host; be as ignorant [non-pejorative] as many of your listeners will be to a topic. You have to appeal to the mass public and the mass public really don’t know a lot about blogging (proven by some of the basic comments and questions from listeners that were read out). That said, there was a definite air of defiance in Tubridy’s stance on the subject matter. He appears like a man shy of internet media because of being burn’t once too often with direct nasty attacks on his public and private persona.
I seem to recall Tubridy being very, very dismissive about bloggers about a year ago. I got the impression he was being criticised on blogs and didn’t like it, therefore bloggers were jumped up good-for-nothin’s.
The most revealing moment came when Tubridy implied that people who didn’t study journalism at university are unqualified to hold an opinion.
I suspect this is a widespread conceit among the inhabitants of the Dublin media-bubble.
Tubrity occupies the bubble world of entertainment. Like many many politicians, he vastly underestimates the common sense and cop-on of the people who inhabit this nation (outside of election time in a boom period!). Therefore you get what you hear.
Go back and listen to Tubrity in the first week he took over from The Marian Finucan show at 9AM. He has come on a long way since so give him credit where possible!
This seems apt.
http://www.bivingsreport.com/2009/the-jon-stewart-show-explains-twitter/
Blogging for Tubridy……
One of the first questions any non-blogger asks about blogging when talking about it with a blogger is usually “why do you do it?”.Ryan Tubridy’s show this morning (yes, I was a bit late out the door ) was somewhat different (as com…
Thanks lads.
@Longman I see your point, and I appreciate what Tubridy might have been trying to do. But he ended up just sounding silly to me. I realise I have a vested interest in this, but I still think Tubridy could have been more even handed in his approach.
@Gamma yes and no… he assumes all his listeners are afraid of the internet when most of them are on Facebook or Bebo at the very least.
@Bock agreed.
@Gerard Stewart is hilarious as ever… though Twitter is an exceptional thing for some applications, especially radio – IMHO
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