Media Is Changing: Embrace It, Don't Cry About It

I'll state the obvious: media is changing. The ways in which we receive new information are changing. For more than 200 years, we had newspapers, dictionaries, and good ol' fashioned "word of mouth" gossip. Today we have blogs, Wikipedia, and Twitter. The basic human functions of reading, writing and sharing news haven't changed, but the the way in which (and the speed with which) we read and share information has changed drastically in the last decade. In short: technology has allowed for the democratization of media.

Newspapers are in dire straits, online media has splintered and proliferated, and news organizations have a choice. They can either find a way to co-opt it or ignore it.

The key to adopting it, I believe, is understanding and embracing the concepts of sharing content, linking, and crowdsourcing. If you use services like Rotten Tomatoes, you already get it. What's changed is the delivery, and the aggregation of information and/or opinions. CNN is an example of a news org that has integrated new media into their regular reporting.

Ignoring these trends is akin to burying your head in the sand; it's not going to change reality. Even worse is to complain about it. Or to call blogging a "dangerous phenomenon" after you've been caught with your pants down.

Newspaper editors can say "Twitter is not a news source" until they're blue in the face, but it's not going to change the fact Twitter is often the fastest way to break news. And in the case of the recent power outage in Harrisonburg, when Internet modems were down in a quarter of the city, texting to Twitter was the only way to get the word out.

--Brent Finnegan