Monday, February 8, 2010
Media / Phillips Nashville Is Talking No Longer
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 4:22 PM
Comments (30)
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You all are a little late on this one. NiT died June 6, 2007. It was a Wednesday.
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And what a Wednesday that was.
I doubt I'll ever walk out of a job on the spot the way I did that day ever again.
Wait, why is Betsy Phillips (aka Aunt B, Tiny Cat Pants) giving props to a woman who left NIT and WKRN in an absolute huff, pissing off everyone on the blogosphere with a temper tantrum of a post to say goodbye? Does anyone have britney's nasty letter that she posted in 2007?
Isn't Betsy Phillips the cat lady/blogger who constantly posts drivel about boob freckles and afghans? I would rather read about Bill Hobbs' wife-beating court documents than read about a boob freckle.
But then again, I guess i'm not a part of that all-important boob freckle/afghan demographic.
Seriously, can someone post Britney Gilbert's nasty farewell letter?
Brittney Gilbert, you were and still are awesome. We miss you and miss the old NIT.
On the subject of Facebook and Twitter, I think if we all adjust, they can be used to promote the longer writing that Brittney was talking about. Just saying.
Great blogmeisters like Brittney and ACK are essential to the blogosphere. The roles of gatekeeper, editor and bouncer cannot be left to chance.
NiT's success was as much a tribute to Brittney's talent and skills as to the bloggers she covered.
Thanks, Betsy, and thanks, Brittney, for serving up some nostalgia and perspective. It's interesting to think back to only a few years ago and how different it all seems. Sad to see NiT officially go, but I always felt it sorta left with Brittney anyway.
Oh, look, Brittney you're in luck. I found excerpts of your silly letter that you couldn't find:
http://www.lostremote.com/2007/06/06/wkrn-blogger-quits-cites-antagonism-from-community/
"I do not want to be seen as a victim here, I only want to honestly tell you why I will no longer be authoring NIT. Your host is simply not cut from strong enough cloth. This is the internet. People are vicious. They are even more vicious when they fail to make any distinction between you and a feelingless, faceless media company. It’s easier to justify the venom that way. And while some people may get off on feeding those frenzies of hate, I do not. I tried to not let it affect me but it does. Every day. The tears and the stress are just not worth it."
I like that - "tear and stress". Were you serious? You shed tears over blogging? I just hope you come back to Nashville, but before you do you'll have to write a nasty note on you current blog and storm out like you did here oh so many moons ago.
It is sad to see NIT go, but with all due respect to Betsy and Brittney the old days of NIT were too nasty at times.
Brittney's resignation letter she posted back in 2007 sums up just how nasty it had become: "I do not want to be seen as a victim here, I only want to honestly tell you why I will no longer be authoring NIT. Your host is simply not cut from strong enough cloth. This is the internet. People are vicious. They are even more vicious when they fail to make any distinction between you and a feelingless, faceless media company. It's easier to justify the venom that way. And while some people may get off on feeding those frenzies of hate, I do not. I tried to not let it affect me but it does. Every day. The tears and the stress are just not worth it."
Brittney may want to move back to Nashville and "start up something similar to what Nashville Is Talking once was," but I wonder if what she made it is worth the tears and the stress all over again?
The kind of community engagement we had until today on NIT was civil and informative without a single argument or nastiness in comments. I'll miss that.
While I disagreed pretty strongly with Brittney toward the end, it's unquestionable that she deserves unreserved praise for building NiT into what it became at its peak. The TN blogosphere became, at least for a while, a true state-wide environment. After she left, no has been able to recapture that state-wide, multi-partisan inclusivity. More's the pity.
I'm one of a few locals who has written the same blog consistently over the entire job-span of both NiT bloggers and I have benefited from both the work of Brittney and the work of Christian.
While I see differences in Brittney's and Christian's approaches, I disagree with the claim that Christian is less engaged in the community than Brittney. In fact, Christian has vigorously promoted this small hyper-local blogger when other local aggregators ignored.
I told Christian that he had a lot prove to make NiT viable again, and I have been pleasantly surprised at the product given the limitations of working in the mainstream media. I don't think that we acknowledge those limitations enough. NiT with Brittney had its own media-bound limitations, which cause me to temper any nostalgia I might feel with the passage of time.
But Christian less engaged in the community? That doesn't fit my first-hand experience of local blogging at all.
I defer to Mike on his comment. He would know better than I. All I know is that commenting dropped drastically.
you folks are just a tad bit too self-reverential, but at least you're doing it with less self-flagellation than you did the last time they pulled the plug on nit.
Wait. Brittney left NIT, agreed. She also moved to a real city.
@Mike: the reason so few bloggers promote your 'enclave' is that a blog with comment moderation is basically the bully pulpit. It's like yelling at your newspaper or Kindle.
You can find some of the old NiT stuff on web.archive.org -- try looking there.. I found my old guestblogging posts there
Jack Lail has a great write-up and I think he does a better job than I did at getting at the strengths of both Gilbert's and Grantham's approaches to NiT.
http://www.jacklail.com/blog/archives/2010/02/on-friday-the-talk-stops.html
Joey, of course, you're absolutely right. Perhaps the only person more pathetic than a boob-freckle discussing cat lady or the woman she briefly claimed to make out with is the dude who appears to have been up all night scouring the internet for proof of how much we suck. We may be stuck being us, but you'll always be you. Good luck with that.
I think four of my comments, each with a link to the archive of my last NiT post, are awaiting moderation.
I still think they made a mistake by calling it Nashville I Stalking. Do people really want a blog about Nashville Stalkers?
(Sorry, I felt I needed to make the same joke on the day it closed as I did on the day it opened.)
Aunt B.,
7:30 pm constitutes up all night? Geez, you're really grabbing at straws.
Joey, I don't know what planet you're on apart from the rest of us - or maybe you just don't speak and read English very well? Maybe you did too many drugs in your youth that fried your brain?
"Nasty letter" - WTF? There was jack nasty about Brittney's farewell letter and it was mostly self-deprecating towards herself. Did your mama drop you on your head when you were born?
"Pissing off everyone in the blogosphere" - again, WTF? Are you on heavy medication for mental health reasons, I'm guessing? Were you even THERE? If anyone was pissed off, it was pissed off at the idiots who pushed Brittney to making the decision to leave. The overwhelming majority of "the blogosphere" - INCLUDING those who had generally been very vocal adversaries of Brittney's all along - understood perfectly well while she was leaving and most - even the haters! - were sorry to see her go. I guarantee you over 99% of "the blogosphere" would agree, so maybe you should have laid off the weed a little, it apparently clouded your brainwaves a great deal.
Everyone else here has been ignoring you for the troll (ooo, you're so cool! I'm so impressed!) you are, which is okay - your complete and total utter inaccuracies look even more stupid than they are standing there not being responded to by the majority. I sincerely apologize if you indeed are someone with the official diagnosis of mental retardation, though.
Brittney - as for your wondering if the Tennessee bloggers will miss NIT: I've missed it since the day you left and probably always will. There have been long periods when it's been impossible for me to keep up and read blogs daily (or even weekly) as I would have liked - if NIT were as it were back in your day, I'd have never fallen out of the loop or been as disconnected as I mostly am these days. My hat's off to you, and always will be, for what you accomplished during that time.
I'd love nothing better than to see it return somehow as it was - or a reasonable facsimile under someone else as talented at bringing a community together as you did. We may not have all liked each other, but every single blogger was an important part of that community - and no offense to Christian at all, but that's what's been missing ever since.
NiT turned into the Terri Schiavo of the Nashville Blogowhatsis.
A shell of her former self lingering on longer than decency should allow and kept on life support by people who may not have had her best interests in mind.
As for "quaint reminders", we still flip over to News 2 occasionally to reminisce about what television was like before HD.
Right. Because we all most certainly need to see high-quality news stories and entertainment like "News Channel 5 HD"'s "Islamville" report in HD.
It does seem a waste and shame to shutter the site.
Brittney set a lot of things in motion locally that had never happened before. However, mainstream blogging was novel and she did not have the same level of competition that Christian had for audience share. She enjoyed advantages that he did not, both within and without the structure of WKRN.
One of the forces without was the negative local blogger reaction to the changes at NiT upon Brittney's leaving. Not only did people refuse to follow a Brittney-less NiT (for better or worse) but at least a couple of attempts that I can remember were made to restart what she created outside of NiT. Those attempts failed in my opinion not because she was no longer here to lead them (although a paid full-time blogger is quite a luxury), but because the local blogosphere was no longer what it was.
Christian not only had to deal with local blogger anger and ambivalence at NiT, but he had to deal with stiffer competition, increasing aggregation by other media sources, more bloggers, and the rise of Twitter and Facebook. I honestly believe that Brittney would have had a hard time holding what she had created together if she had decided to stay.
That said, I think that romanticizing about what NiT was is natural, but also not entirely accurate. Every local aggregator builds a "loyal" following and Brittney had her own (some might call it a clique). But just like Post Politics, that base of regular commenters has a negative side. Lately things seem even nastier. Political and PR organizations are either hiring or recruiting trolls to advance agendas. Half the time it's not fun anymore to read comment boards because of these corporate and party low-lifes. Realistically, I can't believe that NiT with Brittney at the helm would have fared much better than any other mainstream media blogging effort.
Christian, like Brittney, did the best he could with what he was given. What was "missing" under his watch was never entirely Brittney's to provide in the first place.
When I moved to town this summer, NiT helped me find some good local blogs to follow. Having read all the memorial posts it makes me wish I'd been here for Brittney's time to see how well things had worked. I just wonder if anything like a local blogger's association could be put together to have an NiT type site.
Looks like the NiT people might need the help of a talented rates advertising agency to get rid of this mess. Old news or not, it's still news and still affecting them.
