It’s not quite a Bloggers and Old Media lovefest yet, but at least people
seem to have eased up on the ‘us vs them’ rhetoric. AdAge.com has a
nice article explaining why Blogging vs. Traditional Media has been oversold.
Scott Karp’s recent post entitled Bloggers Are So Wrong About Media
raised some hackles, but in a
follow-up post he explained that (in his view) New Media has the
conversations but Old Media has synthesis. As I emailed Scott, I think he raises
some interesting points – but I still don’t quite agree.
I’d argue that new media does have synthesis mechanisms – both
human-powered and automated. As an example of the former, blogs like paidcontent.org and
Ypulse provide comprehensive coverage of niche
sectors. There are also tech-driven synthesis solutions such as search engines (Google,
Technorati, etc), Digg, memeorandum, etc.
None of these ‘new media’ synthesis solutions are perfect by any means – indeed
just last week Digg dug a
hole for itself when many of its members falsely (and largely anonymously)
accused an O’Reilly writer of theft. But this new media world of blogging and
aggregators is evolving rapidly and synthesis is one of many things that
continues to improve.
Overall though, it’s no longer a case of Old Media vs New Media… actually I
don’t think it ever was. As I mentioned above with paidcontent and ypulse,
human-powered synthesis still has a very big part to play. Old media brands have
the resources and brand strength to create powerful Web synthesis solutions,
should they so desire. But it’s no longer just old media playing the game – the
rest of us can play too now 😉
