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2
Nails, heads and old media
Filed Under Social web, Media
Ben Laurie hits several nails in the head of the old media. Quoting from a BBC article in his post about bullying on YouTube, he notes.
You’ll notice that in the above, I do not link to PAT, nor do I link to YouTube, Emma-Jane Cross or BeatBullying. Normally I would, but as I was about to embark on a session of Googling, I thought “Why do I have to do this? If the BBC had got with the programme there would be links in their article that I could follow.”
This is one of my gripes with the old ‘respectable’ media. Their embedded links are linking to their own articles. (And Ben is right, the links in the sidebar of the BBC is barely a half-way measure, a strange separation of content and sources). I am sure it has to do with driving traffic to their website and revenue etc etc. I can understand that but not linking to quoted sources or referred facts is an anti-social web practice. This is why New Media is not Social Media. The former is merely the Old Media in digital format. No change in attitude, no understanding, no point but to keep the old models afloat. New Media don’t grok the web. Social Media don’t care, mainly because there is no such thing. It’s just people doing stuff on the internet. The two get entangled when the people do for themselves what New Media purports to deliver a la demand side supplying itself.
Cue Ben:
…old media should stop whining about how they are the real journalists and we losers with blogs are just some pale imitation and start, instead, providing a service that is as good as the average blog, instead of a mere transposition of their print columns onto web pages.
The whole point about the web is it allows you to link to your sources, to tangents of interest and to full versions of documents mentioned. But the old media does none of this: they think the web is like paper. If they don’t want to go the way of the dinosaurs they need to drag themselves into the 20th century and start linking.
Exeunt old school journalism.
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