The New Media

The New York Press, at the end of a rambling article on social media, raises a point few people have talked about:

The question social media is creeping up on, and the mainstream media is avoiding, is: What happens when the independent social media hive mind stops linking to old media and starts creating its own new media?

This question drives a stake into a commonly heard argument from traditional media types: "Yeah, well, blogs are good and all, but all they do is link to and comment on existing media. Without those links, they've got nothing." In fact, that argument was the basis of an idiotic proposal a few weeks ago that old media stop or delay posting stories on the Web.

Once again, people are trying to frame the future based only on what they know about the present. Right now, yes, a lot of blog commentary and social media is based on links back to traditional, professional media. But that assumes that only professionals can create content. Nonsense. There's reams of original content, some of it quite good, being posted on the Web every day, and it's already nibbling around the edges of mainstream media's alleged monopoly on content creation.

Examples? There are countless specialized sites covering industries, sports or hobbies that already are functioning as little specialized magazines on those topics, with content created by people who care deeply about them. User-generated sites such as Backfence and Northwest Voice are tapping into the collective knowledge of the communities they serve (as are zillions of listservs and Yahoo Groups sites). Sites such as VoiceofSanDiego and WestportNow are providing coverage written by former members of traditional media. And fascinating experiments like the recently announced political site starring two former Washington Post reporters aim to demonstrate that high-quality journalism can be produced outside traditional media companies. There's also a lot of interesting journalism being produced in a non-traditional way in the discussion areas of some of the larger political sites, where participants are doing their own fact-finding and fact-checking. Just ask Dan Rather.

All of those examples are producing original content that blogs and social media sites can and do link to. But that's just the beginning.

I firmly believe we're going to see rise of independent, high-quality journalism sites, undoubtedly created and run by professionals being cast off in the wave of newspaper buyouts and layoffs, that take an I.F. Stone-like approach to doing muckraking reporting on important subjects. We're also going to see many more entrepreneurial journalistic efforts that use a small staff, unencumbered by high costs of traditional media, to cover communities and subjects.

Taken together, that's going to vastly broaden the amount of journalism being created online, and greatly erode the hegemony of traditional media outlets. Will those mainstream publications go away? Of course not. But they're going to be in an increasingly crowded field, and most importantly, those traditional journalistic institutions will no longer "own" the news. It will come from many, many other places. And that's what blogs and social media will be linking to—when they're not reporting news themselves!

Update: New York media/politics blogger Gur has an interesting statistical take on this topic. It's based on Alexa data, which isn't always very reliable, but it nonetheless shows that mainstream media is no longer the only game in town when people go looking for information.