In Blogs We (Wrongly) Trust
June 15, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 3)
One recent night, I caught a snippet of NBC’s “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” television program. One of his guests was the network’s news anchor, Brian Williams, who was describing his newfound fascination with Apple’s iPod music player.
Williams described how he’d asked a co-worker what he was listening to on his iPod. The co-worker replied it was a podcast of a program he couldn’t listen to earlier—and added that it would be cool if you could actually hear the podcast live as it was happening. Williams, going for the laugh on the comedy talk show, retorted, “Yes, I think they call that radio!”
The news anchor commented on the irony: Even as folks spend all kinds of money on 65-inch plasma screen televisions for their home theater systems, they watch shows on their 2 1/2-inch iPod screens. He said the same co-worker couldn’t wait until he could watch video on his iPod as it was happening. “That’s called television,” Williams noted wryly.
It was a good-natured exchange about the obsessive nature of Americans and their gadgets, but Williams failed to touch on the broader point here.
Before the Internet and wireless gadgets, the only way to reach large audiences was through the mass media—radio, television and newspapers.
Decades ago, to get your message across unfiltered, companies bought ads in those media. But if you didn’t have the money to buy ads—perhaps you’re an environmental group seeking to get the word out about the shrinking rain forests, or a candidate for political office trying to make a point about your record—you had to go through editors, who would decide if your story was worthy of wide distribution, and if so, how much of it they could fit into a printed news story or a timed television piece. Rarely was an organization’s or individual’s news announcement run verbatim. More often than not, news releases were tossed aside.
Technology has changed all that. Now, unfiltered news announcements can be posted in full on a corporate or charitable organization’s Web site. Garage musicians can record their songs, upload them onto a computer, and distribute them on peer-to-peer networks. Would-be pundits can write to their hearts’ content—space is no object in the blogosphere.
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