Old media under attack by bloggers and their ilk

My colleague Lee McClain passed this article on to me — via a post-it note attached to the dead-tree edition of the story.

“Move over, mainstream media, it’s the voter’s turn,” says the blurb
for an event called: “Tapping the Creative Community: The Power of
Voter Generated Media.”

To be sure, there are television satellite trucks parked in the
parking lots around the Pepsi Center, blow-dried anchormen speaking
earnestly into cameras and dignified, old hands like Bob Schieffer of
CBS roaming about the hall.

But in the media security lines snaking outside the convention
venue, the faces are mostly young, the equipment mostly laptops, and
the credentials for Web sites you may have never heard of. —Mackenzie Carpenter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

2 thoughts on “Old media under attack by bloggers and their ilk

  1. Until video displays are so inexpensive that we won’t mind leaving them on a train or we’ll take them out into the rain, people will still use print. I remember a scene in the 90s SF series Babylon 5, in which the director wanted a character to crumple up an order and throw it on the ground.
    A few episodes before that dramatic scene, he wrote a little throw-away scene in which a minor character complains about doing paperwork, and notes that for 200 years now people have been promised that a paperless society was just around the corner. Of course, the show’s producer needed to establish that paper still existed in the society, so that he could keep the scene of the hero crumpling up that printout.
    It would have been far too violent, and the character would have been less sympathetic, if he had smashed a computer screen instead.

  2. Ha, Dennis–I actually thought about running upstairs, getting my laptop, doing a search for the online article, and emailing it to you. But it just seemed so much easier to stick the newspaper (yes, I still read a print one that comes to my front yard in a plastic bag) into my backpack. I even had time to finish my coffee. All the while wondering: because I read several print newspapers and teach magazine writing, am I the Seton Hill equivalent of Bob Schieffer, the old media being chased away by all of you new media types?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *