It says nothing about whether people who work hard get noticed, or about whether if you work hard you will get noticed.
(Actually, not even that, he tells us he went to a conference and was hired by someone he schmoozed with!)
Of course there will be outliers who get into the good blogging jobs easier, but as he says they expect 5 quality posts a day at RRW, many probably aren't cut out for that and it's probably hard to assess without past work.
This guy struck it lucky. I'm not sure an exception makes the rule.
Marshall Kirkpatrick editor Mashable got his start at a content farm while working at a convenience store.
Then got hired by TechCrunch after his stories got lots of traction.
Then got hired as editor of RRW after TechCrunch.
He sees AOL's content strategy creating a similarly powerful platform for great writers to rise from the depths to the top.
Kind of an interesting counter point to current criticisms that AOL is only going to produce "quantity over quality..."
But no great loss: it's 58 slide. Maybe it's just me, but I found that it "ain't no SJ keynote."
I often think of Weblogs, Inc. as a sort of freak of startup nature. Very little funding, but the company had a huge impact, especially on its acquirer. AOL's core publishing technology platform is Blogsmith, Weblogs, Inc.'s home grown CMS, not to mention how Engadget, Autoblog and other influential Weblogs, Inc. blogs have given other AOLers insight into what good content looks like.
As Marshall mentions in the post, I'm wondering where the new minor leagues are. I'd guess just being a regular contributor to Hacker News might be as close as there is right now.
It was the pile em up and sell em cheap model that burnt me out in the end. I genuinely spent a lot of time early on writing quality posts, getting breaking news (because I was in the UK and so awake earlier) and doing in depth analysis type articles. Then I got fed up of the pressure to constantly keep churning stuff out, and one day I looked at the crap I was writing and quit. There were tricks you could do to pump up your post quota - I remember starting WoW.com's Breakfast Topic as one such vehicle, though it was also an interesting conversation starter.
Still, I am very glad I did it. I learnt a lot about the gaming and tech industries and got a start in journalism as a result. Which I moved away from, but that was my choice.
Journalists or people who right copy?
I'm sure someone will level a "no true Scotsman" objection at me but still ...
