Item! Old Media Wants to Make You Look Foolish

Old media wants to belittle you, treat you like a little kid. At first it wanted to embrace you, hoping that some of your cool would rub off. It used you to fill pages, airtime, space. It built you up to build ratings and circulation. It was getting desperate then but it still looked down its nose at you. You didn't have a table at Michael's. You didn't have a proper editorial process. You didn't have a copy desk. You just didn't have the same standards.

Like a well-dressed call girl scoffing at the common whores, Old Media felt an irrational exhuberance about its own fate and neglected to see how it fit into the system as a whole.

Now it has to put the knife in and do it quickly. Its own shortcomings have become too obvious. It's own Judith Millers are standing in the doorway.

But the lumbering giant will not go down quickly. It will stagger a bit. It will get angry and throw things. It will try to take you down with it. Do not get in the way of its fall by making deals. Step aside and let the body hit the floor.

Item! Old Media Is Afraid Of You

Old media is afraid of you. It is quaking in its boots. You have all the power.

It doesn't know what to do with itself these days. It feels its grip on eyeballs and ears starting to loosen. It is panicking. It will try to throw its money around, try to gobble you up to silence you, put you on the payroll and put you out to pasture. Don't fall for these tricks. It does not have your best interests at heart. It is only trying to fend you off by pulling you in closer. It does not want you to succeed. It has a great deal of money tied up in its monopoly.

Don't worry. Old Media has already sown the seeds of its own destruction. They have swallowed the media cyanide whole.

They are sleeping. They do not not want to believe.

Birth of a Blog

According to John Dunning's brilliant and exhaustive The Encyclopedia of Old Time Radio, on December 11, 1933 a meeting was held at the Hotel Biltmore between representatives of the newspaper business and the still fledgling radio news business. After years of bitter feuding and blatant attempts by the newspaper industry to cut the legs out from under radio news departments, a compromise of sorts was agreed to. Radio would be restricted to two newscasts a day, one at 9:30 in the morning and another at 9 PM, it could not sell any advertising during this news programming, could not have any reporters with microphones at breaking news events and would have to point toward newspapers for the "complete details" of any news story. In return, the radio news divisions would get, basically nothing. As Dunning describes, this was the "last hurrah in the attempt by the press to control the radio news." Within months these rules were ignored and radio's immediacy gripped the world.

This rocky transition from newspapers to radio mirrors closely the current transition from Old Media to New Media. For some odd reason, New Media does not realize the power it has. It continues to make concessions to Old Media, crippling itself in the process.

This blog will seek to change that. To help rally New Media -- the unaligned forces currently creating the most compelling content across the net -- and keep it from continuously selling out its best interests to the crumbling carcass of the traditional media companies.