Shall we court the blogosphere?

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 20th, 2007

Allow us to think out loud for a minute. (Which, when we get right down to it, is what blogging is all about, no?) We were recently alerted to a mention of standup comedy on a blog. The blogger, a writer by the name of Al Shipley, runs a blog called Narrowcast and he got a coupla tickets to see Jim Gaffigan at the Lyric in Baltimore. Afterward, he scurried home and wrote a 189-word review of the show.

It got us to thinking about things like how to go about getting press, how to approach the alternative press and what benefit there is from getting reviewed. And then we considered the blogosphere (the alternative alternative press!) and we thought: Is it not a great idea to court the bloggers? Wouldn’t it be a good thing to attempt to get the attention of bloggers for the purpose of getting reviewed and getting the name out there?

Gaffigan, of course, is a pretty big name and, as such, he has been getting ink in the MSM on nearly every stop of his recent tour. But the rest of us, who aren’t as high-profile as the Gaffigans or the Regans or the Blacks of the standup world (and who aren’t as likely to get a hit in the major dailies), might consider comping the occasional blogger at a show here or there. Publicity is publicity, right?

When compared to mainstream writers, bloggers are a bit more accessible. And most entertainment writers at major dailies are pulled in so many different directions that they rarely pay attention to standup. Bloggers, on the other hand, pay attention to whatever they want to, without any input from editors (and they have a larger, nearly inexhaustible, newshole!) and they might actually welcome being treated like “real journalists” (and we don’t mean that in a bad way).

The downside is that, in most cases, their “circulation” is a fraction of even the smallest newspaper. But, they might just have a narrowly-focused audience that perfectly matches the demo that we as comedians can benefit from.

(Of course, we’re bloggers, but we have an editorial policy of not reviewing standup performances. Occasionally, we’ll write something here or there, but it’s never a review in the traditional sense.)

We don’t recommend that anyone seek mentions solely in blogs, to the exclusion of all other forms of exposure. But it’s becoming clear that blogs are slowly asserting themselves as legitimate sources of news for significant numbers of people out there and we’d be goofy to ignore it.

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