Foxnation Seeing It New At Thefoxnation.com

I see a potential Charlie Foxtrot in the making here (non-aviators will have to figure out what Charlie Foxtrot stands for). MSNBC tried feedback message boards early on in its inception and threw in the towel after a year or two, not because there was no response but because the response was so out of control and unwieldy. And that was before the Internet became what it is today. I can’t believe FNC is going to let this thing be the Wild West; unmoderated. That would be a PR disaster because it would attract a whole bunch of Foxnation baiters plastering anti-FNC epithets everywhere. So right from the beginning this thing won’t be about “your views” but “the views we allow you to express”. So, how much moderation will go into this endeavor? I guess time will tell. But if it gets to be a full time job, it won’t be worth the trouble and FNC will follow MSNBC’s lead and give up after a time.

Then there’s the fact that, based on what little we know, there’s little to differentiate between today’s blogs and social networking sites and what FoxNation will offer. Is someone who invested a lot of time and effort to set up some sort of self-expression platform (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc) really going to throw all that away and embrace FoxNation? I have my doubts. Sure there will be the die hard Fox Fans who haven’t already got a platform up and running who may jump on board. But the established ones may not.

There is really nothing that FoxNation can provide that people can’t already find in established internet ecosystems (Free Republic, Democratic Underground, Daily KOS, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc, etc etc…). And most of those will probably let you express yourself more freely than FoxNation will for the simple reason that this is a corporate media entity and those things still haven’t figured out the rules of the internet and keep trying to bend it to their will.

Update: Evidently the web masters at FoxNation haven't got everything locked down until the launch completely. Someone discovered this which doesn’t show much except a stub.

Further Update: Thefoxnation.com is now working fine. We just have to watch and see what The Fox Nation will achieve in news.

Reprinted under Fair Use from Inside Cable News.