Mashable’s Identity Crisis

My friend Jon Lazar over at Just Jon has posted a brave and important piece this morning on Mashable, the ubiquitous social media site. If you don’t know Mashable, then you probably don’t spend much time reading, thinking or interacting with the social web. This is because Mashable is simply everywhere. They’ve reached that point of critical mass that most bloggers only dream of. The last I heard they had suprassed 20 million page views a month, and that was some time ago, so I’ll assume that number is even higher now. For a blog, that is tremendous.

But the problem is that Mashable is more than a blog. They are a full-fledged leader in the social media world. And they aren’t acting like it. Prompted by a message that Mashable sent out declaring that they were looking for developers, Jon added these thoughts:

Mashable’s barebones form gives the prospective applicant no information about the position, no information about the company, and no information about anything beyond the words at the top of the page.  From the look of the page, it could be a fake, but I am dismissing that possibility because I saw the link to the page come from reputable sources, including Mashable employees.  The minimalist page takes without giving back to the applicant and even then takes minimal information from the potential employee.

When I read this I immediately thought back to when a few months ago Mashable made BIG NEWS by announcing they were going to be hiring real, actual journalists. It was assumed that this was some kind of direction shift for Mashable and that they were now interested in serious reportage and investigative journalism. Here is the link.

I was so excited to see this development and had high hopes at the time for the future of investigative journalism. Mashable was going to save journalism! OK, that might be a bit of hyperbole, but the fact remained that here was a site that was the absolute epitome of social and new media and they were looking back to traditional media to buttress their skills. I envisioned a world where the pioneers of new media would blend with the best talent of traditional media and build a model that would truly serve our democracy, which we all know, depends on a free and robust fourth estate.

Unfortunately, as soon as I took a closer look I soon realized those hopes were misplaced. The post directed applicants to a similar form from the one Jon critiqued in his post. It was the height of minimalism, and furthermore, it was insulting and in no way appropriate to the kind of jobs and talent they were supposedly looking for. (Full Disclosure: I did in fact refer a few journalists I know to Mashable and used my connections there, connections I suspect will no longer be nice to me, to try to expedite their applications. Nothing came of the effort) Furthermore, every journalist I referred the post to came back to me with an “Are you kidding me?” response. Apparently, Mashable’s serious lack of tone and professionalism reeked to high heaven.

Furthermore, since that time I haven’t heard or seen anything on Mashable’s site that could be construed as the fruit of this past effort.

But look, this piece isn’t a hatchet job on Mashable. In fact, that would be a pretty stupid thing to do because of how big and, therefore, important Mashable is. I am likely to lose a lot of friends over this post. I hope that is not the case and that people will respect my critique as coming from a place of love and not hate.

Because I want Mashable, as the unalloyed leader in the social media news space, to improve. I want it to improve its product. I want it to get away from its sensationalist and often pedantic blogging and get into serious reportage. Right now it is on track to be the People Magazine of social media. As social media as an industry matures, it will be highly important that the community police itself. And that -selfpolicing is going to require serious efforts by serious journalists: to uncover malfeasance (of which there is so much in social media), to serve the public interest by investigating and broadcasting stories that are important to the culture at large, and to increase transparency.

Social media is at a tipping point. It’s winning over our culture and remaking that culture in its own image at the very same time. But our culture has a tendency to go big, bold and brash. We have a tendency to take the easy road, to chase eyeballs and therefore profits over what should be chased down and hunted: the truth. Mashable, because of its leadership position, has an unique opportunity to do this. Unfortunately, it just seems like they aren’t interested in doing that. It seems in fact that they are interested more in acting like a tabloid.

To be fair, one recent development has once again given me hope for Mashable’s future direction. Vadim Lavrusik, a digital media journalist and theoretician, recently announced he is joining Mashable as a social media manager.

I am excited about what’s taking place at Mashable, which recently celebrated its new headquarters in NYC (come visit me in Union Square) and is also partnering with my soon-to-be alma mater Columbia University Journalism School on a paid online video fellowship for j-school students that will begin this summer.

I respect Vadim tremendously and think this is a great move for Mashable. I just hope that this latest plan turns out better than some of their earlier promises that seemed to have fallen flat.

Image Courtesy of HaPe_Gera on Flickr

Tagged as: Jon Lazar, Mashable, Social Media Identity Crisis, Vadim Lavrusik