Before we blog focus, I strongly recommend that you read David Carr’s New York Times piece called The Fall and Rise of Media. It’s a pretty extraordinary recent history of traditional media vs. “new media,” New York City, and the massive and convulsive changes that continue to rock the media and tech industries, and our lives in many ways, to this day.
As someone who lives on the webby side of the divide, I found the end of the piece to be most compelling:
Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.
I was particularly taken with the phrase “finding ways of making ambient information more useful.” That to me really speaks to what is going on today with social media, making massive communications platforms like Twitter more useful, content aggregation, digital curation, real time news and conversations, and other hot topics going on today.
And now for the bloggy reaction:
* Gawker: Media columnist David Carr just Twittered a caption for his latest filing, a media death knell with a bright-eyed ending, summoning the title of Joan Didion's famous essay about leaving her New York experience behind. Is the comparison merited?
* A VC: David has it about right. I've watched this transformation and helped to finance it (and his first job in NYC too at Inside.com but that's a different story). I believe the move from a velvet rope model to a meritocracy is a good thing and that the new media business we are building in the wake of the old one will be a better media business; leaner, faster, and controlled more by users than media moguls.
* Daily Patricia: Print and media are two different things. Print is an information distribution platform. Media is an industry that creates and delivers information over platforms. This could be any platform as long as the media industry can adapt to it.
* HighTouch: I suspect that this is a story fixed to play itself out over and over again. Media just happened to be one of the early casualties. There is zero reason to believe that this same scenario isn't unfolding for all formerly closed enterprises, and if you think your enterprise is still closed you're just hiding your head in the sand.
* Screenwerk: Trust and quality, two values that content brands should stand for, will continue to gain in importance in this new world of digital serfs and sloppy UGC.
(this post originally appeared on Technorati)