Biz Blogger Served by Corporate Takeover & Wooohah!

Nice one-two knockout from Corporate Takeover and Wooohah! in their response to a post by a Fast Company blogger regarding Ludacris' restaurant plans.

[Note: Check the comments for Lynne d Johnson's take on what she considers unfair attacks on our part.  I see what she's saying and I've softened some bits and want to note that my real interest here is in seeing new hip hop bloggers emerge with critiques of hip hop business coverage rather than in attacking Saabira Chaudhuri.]

Corporate Takover brings the pain as he points out what I've been saying for years now, business writers who haven't been paying attention don't take hip hop artists very seriously as businessmen.

That's why you usually see hip hop business news on the entertainment page.

Wooohah's Scott Yeti brings it in the comments section at the Fast Company post with his take.

It's nice not to be the only one doing that kind of thing except that's also why these newcomers are two of the factors making me reassess my whole game.

Corporate Takeover is clearly going to be more directly hooked into the power structure than I would ever want to be.  That's a $trong place to be and something that hip hop business has needed.  I'm far too critical to play that role but I think it can be played in a positive useful way that can lead to much more money off blogging than I'll ever get off blogging alone.

Wooohah! is playing it from another angle with a bit more of a celebrity focus and especially nice coverage of the film and television industries.  To get real traffic on a hip hop blog, you've got to have the celebrity candy in some form, but the film news is what caught my eye and that's why I invited Mr. Yeti to follow in Hypebot's footsteps with his own Film/TV category.

Sadly I've been informed by Scott that he won't be able to continue his Wooohah! contributions and I've shifted his posts to the Film/DVD and TV/Video categories.  But that's not the last you'll hear of Wooohah! here at ProHipHop.

Comments

[Lynne d Johnson]

Clyde

C'mon now, you blogged for FC as an expert for a little bit, and you know I work there, so you know that the entire Fast Company or business world is not clueless to the fact that hip-hop has power in a business context. You've also seen an article or two about real businesses in the mag.

Now to put it all into context, I think that each comment that criticized the post focused on one aspect of the post and not its entirety.

What about the list of celebrities (not just hip hop ones) who failed at such ventures? What about the list of the ones who succeeded? And then what about the bit about Luda at the end:

"With a business major from Georgia State University, some years of experience as a manager and a seasoned restaurateur to hold his hand, Ludacris is in a better position than most celebrities to try his hand in the restaurant business. How well customers warm to his entrepreneurial efforts remains to be seen."

Also though, overall, I have to say that I've found business magazines doing a much better job at covering business than they did say 10 years ago. There was a time when only Russell got ink in mainstream business publications and it's no longer that way.

I'm not defending the writer or business publications on the whole, that not my steez. But often, I do wish that people would read something in its entirety (of any type of writing) and analyze it as a whole and not just make their own formula from the sum of its parts.

On another note, very interested in seeing what plans are down the pike for you.

[Clyde Smith]

Maybe I am being too hard on this blogger and it does cover more ground than most such posts. And certainly I benefited from my own chance to experiment at Fast Company, so you make some good points.

In some respects I'm more interested in these guys stepping up now that most of the old guard like Hashim Warren aren't really visible and folks like Michael Miraflor just don't have the time.

But I guess I did give Saabira Chaudhuri an unfair look.

You're right that Fast Company has run some real coverage and so have other publications.

Yet the majority of what I see in business pubs like Forbes still just seems to be a way of getting some celebrity juice.

I have yet to see the kind of coverage and in-depth analysis of any of these businesses that one regularly sees about major record labels or film companies.

I mean, why is Russell Simmons still treated like a god by business journalists when most of his new media projects have failed? As one of the most visible figures, I'm amazed at the pass he gets and all anybody seems to know about is 360 Hip Hop.

That's just one example but one very glaring example.

The pass Global Grind got was another with most outlets taking their initial positioning at face value. April Joyner's piece for FC was a rare exception in digging a bit deeper but that was about it:
http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2007/12/russell-simmons-global-grind.html

But have any of the tech or business outlets, including major tech blogs, noticed Global Grind's near total shift in strategy even though they're a tech company with vc funding?

And why has no one outside of hip hop reported on Elliott Wilson's firing from what I thought was a major magazine?

I can't find any serious news coverage of Wilson's firing.

So, while coverage may be better than 10 years ago, that shouldn't be a surprise given how big some of these business enterprises have gotten in the last 10 years and how big some of the deals have been.

But thanks for digging in. I like it when you make strong statements. That's a good look.