The Modern Media Ecosystem
indi.ca as a graph
The New York Times is saying that blogs are now losing youth to Twitter, Facebook, etc (Caveats). This is also something I’ve perceived, though you have to question what is being lost. Today, there is a new media ecosystem emerging. At the bottom there is Twitter and Facebook, effectively the global street. Above that there are blogs, semi-professional street criers. Then there are traditional journalists, the class of professional scribes.
When I started blogging it was the easiest way to ‘be’ online, but it was still rather difficult. Since then blogging has gotten easier, but Twitter is easier still. Facebook is also a more effective way to ‘be’. What has happened, however, is that what blogs have lost in quantity and growth they may have gained in quality and authority. Blogs are becoming closer to journalism, if they want to be.
In essence, blogs are growing up.
You can see it in the revolutions across the Arab world where bloggers emerge as leaders and, as in Tunisia, where one briefly became a minister. You can also see it in solo bloggers like Andrew Sullivan that are able to work with TIME, The Atlantic and now The Daily Beast and other bloggers like Dooce that are able to make a comfortable living. Blogging is effectively becoming a middle class between elite journalists and the masses on Twitter and FB. Which is not a bad place to be.
Blogs are nice. More coherent than raw Twitter and more independant and er, faceted? than refined journalism.
In my opinion Roger Ebert’s blog is the best blog there is. He’s a film critic but also a brilliant writer.