« And now a word from our blogger. | Main | Idle chatter »

Bungeejumping journalism

Reading this post by Tim Porter, what jumps out at me is that the tension between old and new media is one of opposing extremes. Porter says:

Of course, in the real world of newspapers, where risk-averse culture and deeply ingrained fear of change produce oppositional arguments at the slightest whiff of innovation, zero-basing a newsroom is next to impossible.

Having worked at a newspaper, this is pretty true, but I attribute this mostly to the general hidebound nature of corporations.

But against this is the continual tendency of the new media crowd to break out the blog triumphalism as an answer to everything. As much as the news media may fear the "slightest whiff of innovation," the other side is addicted to nothing but innovation, and continues to pretend that lowering the bar for distribution equates to equal access to audience. If newspapers are a "risk-averse culture," blogs are a risk-addicted one. There is a continual dissonance in BigBlog circles between the idea that blogs have somehow achieved a pure meritocracy untainted by any sort of nepotism or politics, and the much-touted idea of the "long tail" in which nanoblogs somehow replace the phone or IM for small groups of people.

The extremes make it as polarized as any political discussion you can name. Perhaps Jarvis can wring a few more TV appearances out of denying it.