NYU’s Jay Rosen declares the “war” between New and Old Media over in a long keynote at the recent Blogging, Journalism & Credibility conference at Harvard. Pulling together quotes from key posts over the past few years he says that we really need to stop staring each other in the eyes waiting for the other to blink and realize that the opinionated bloggers and objective journalists need each other. One is not better than the other, they are both different sides of the story and both necessary to paint a complete picture. To a certain extent, the popularity of blogs is a result of the audience (and the working journalist) wanting to pull back some of the powers they’ve ceded to mainstream media.
The price of professionalizing journalism was the de-voicing of the
journalist. The price for having mass media was the atomization of the
audience, who in the broadcasting model were connected “up” to the
center but not “across” to each other. Well, blogging is a re-voicing
tool in journalism, and the Net’s strengths in horizontal communication
mean that audience atomization is being overcome.
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