Bloggers and YouTubers: the new rockstars

I must confess: as a journalist, I spent some years, during college and beyond, learning to underestimate or even disregard bloggers. At that time, and that was not so long ago, we believed that blogs were a repository of junk, not more than worthless personal opinions or a copy-and-paste news outlet.

Today, I work for a printed newspaper, one of the most important and influential ones in the country, but struggling with a shrinking newsroom. I can’t even remember how many massive layoffs I’ve already survived in the last seven years – after the fourth one, I stopped counting. We are still big and influential, and have a growing audience on the Internet. But it’s not rare that our best scoop gets fewer clicks than a video from the catchy blogger of the week.

Yes, bloggers have become the rockstars of the Internet – and also, at least in Brazil, YouTubers. They achieved unprecedented levels of popularity, having videos shared by millions and taking other hundreds to wait hours in line for an autograph. In Brazil, the best example is Kefera, a 22-year-old who has got 7.5 million followers on YouTube (in this article, where she's taken as a celebrity, she poses for a photo wearing a t-shirt that says: ‘Who the fuck is Kefera?’). She is not the only one: Jout-Jout, a 25-year-old, has 665,000 followers. Camila Coelho, a beauty blogger, got 2.4 million.

In the Attention Economy (Davenport and Beck, 2011), bloggers and YouTubers are probably millionaires. Some of their videos are 30-minute long – way more than it takes to watch an average TV story or an article on my paper. Last year, Kefera fans waited in line for until 7 hours during her book signing.

In a world where information is at our fingertips (anywhere, anytime), it is impressive how these stars manage to hold the attention of thousands of people for such long time.

We could learn from them: they are captivating. They reveal their personalities, share their opinions and lives (of course, journalists have a boundary for that, but we could benefit from a more transparent relationship with our audience). More important, they speak the same language as their audience, mastering the art of digital storytelling and spreading their content through social media.

Finally, I raise another question: why don’t we, journalists, become their partners? Why can’t bloggers or YouTubers talk about the latest news, or recommend a news website? Or even more: why can’t a newspaper or a TV channel have their very own ‘YouTuber’, telling stories in a very creative way?

It’s time for journalism to become more dashing and venturesome, if we want to conquer attention in times of information surplus.