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Thursday, February 02, 2006

Old and new media

Spreading the word on the possibilities of new media can be a tedious process. Trying to explain the transformational power of blogs, citizen media, social networking, and the like to the uninitiated takes great patience and determination. Often you end up most frustrated with yourself for not being able to describe what you see happening before your eyes in terms that make sense to people less involved in the early stages. That might be one of the reasons bloggers tend to save these conversations until speaking or linking with each other.

Particular warning goes out to those initiating these discussions with traditional (print/tv/radio) media veterans whose careers are setting against the rising tide. Usually you reach an agreement that "we will just see what happens" with both parties confident of vindication in time.

That's why the "long bet" placed between Dave Winer of Scripting News and New York Times Vice President Martin Nisenholz in 2002 is so intriguing.

The Bet in 2002:
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.

Superblogger Jason Kottke decided to jump the gun a bit and check the results on eight top news stories in 2005 including hurricane Katrina, the London bombings, elections in Iraq, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the appointment of a new pope.

He selected a Google keyword search for each and compared the results for the NY Times, blogs, "citizen" media like Wikipedia and other "traditional" media like the BBC or CNN.

The results make tough reading for Nisenholz as blogs trounce the NY Times on six out of eight events and there is still two years before Winer is coming to collect. But by expanding his analysis to other traditional and citizen media Kottke highlights that on six out of eight events traditional media still scores higher rankings than citizen or blogging sites.

So not sure if the conclusion is that the NY Times continues to suffer from an odd website strategy (presumably at the direction of Nisenholz) where content is often deemed premium (members-only) or requires payment for access. The ultimate triumph of other traditional media in the assessment suggests this might be the case.

Another take would be that there are only a few surviving powerhouses of traditional media that have managed to hold their position in the face of the rising tide of citizen and blog media and it is only a matter of time (perhaps by 2007) before they too fall on their swords.

Regardless it is a terrific exercise in providing a baseline for this debate in 2005 and would be useful to repeat in future years to understand trends and settle bets. And it provides the digerati with a new starting point for describing new media to the old hacks ... "OK. For example. There was this bet in 2002 see ..."

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