Author, blogger and New Yorker classical music writer Alex Ross has a new blog on the New Yorker website. Here’s his description:
This blog, which takes its name from a part-song by the English Renaissance master John Dowland, will consist of short commentaries, addenda to New Yorker
pieces, audio excerpts from recommended new CDs, links to novelties and
oddities around the Internet, and the like. My old site, with its library
of twentieth-century audio samples, will remain intact, and perhaps
expand from time to time. Unquiet Thoughts won’t be a blog of the
reader-bombarding, twenty-posts-a-day kind, but I hope to provide
enough fresh matter to warrant a few visits a week. I’ve imported two
resources from the old site: a classical-blog listing and a page devoted to music critics and music sites. Other links can be found in the blogroll on the left column.
Unquiet Thoughts would be a clever enough name on its own, but as a sequel to a blog called The Rest is Noise? Groan. The smartness slays me. I’m going to make some strawberry milk to soothe my blog-name(s)-envy.
From your perspective as a publicist, though, what do you think about the potential rewards and hazards of moving off a world-famous blog name to something new?
I think Alex has always made it clear that ‘The Rest is Noise’ blog was a means to a ‘The Rest is Noise’ book end. In that case, it’s smart to start a fresh brand now, and it seems the choices are to launch entirely different site to begin (public) work on and discussion of a new book topic, or to associate himself further with ‘The New Yorker’ brand, which he’s doing. ‘The New Yorker’ website has built-in traffic, so this time around he’s not completely reliant on building a new readership or moving the existing readership over. Starting a blog 5 years ago and building toward the book was–whether he intended it to be or not– a stroke of marketing genius (though I suspect he was not awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant for his marketing and PR prowess. We’ll give him a Pitchy for that. There is no cash prize.). I think it would have been a mistake to keep blogging under the now-published book title, well-known as it may be, but it would also have been a huge PR mistake to remove himself from the blogosphere. This model clearly worked for book sales, but there’s no reason to do things exactly the same way. -AA