We’ve been waiting for (our alma mater) the S.I. Newhouse school or NYU’s j-school to offer an Intro to Blogging course, finally throwing out the traditional media’s emphasis on “nut grafs” and “ledes” in favor of unsubstantiated rumors and repurposing content under the guise of HTML “blockquotes.”
Okay, we’ve only been waiting for that since media aegis Adam Penenberg raised the issue in today’s Media Hack. He says traditional newspaper actually aren’t dying, it’s just everyone’s reading them online. And they get clickity-happy.
They don’t sit down with a newspaper for an hour to read it cover to cover. Instead, they bounce from site to site, story to story, link to link, customizing their newsgathering experience, clicking on whatever stories from whatever publications appeal to them.
We’d say it were media coke, but have you ever tried snorting a line off your flat screen? You gotta turn it on its side and then do your damndest not to get fingerprints everywhere. Too much trouble when you could just roll up a copy of Newsweek.