So New media.  This sprung up in my mind because actor Robert Llewellyn, most famous for Red Dwarf and famous in my mind for hosting what was called Junkyard Wars in the U.S. and it’s official name from the U.K. Channel 4 is Scrapheap Challenge(still airing), was on an episode of Macbreak Weekly hosted by one of my favorite geeks Leo Laporte (TechTV’s The Screen Savers, Call for Help now creator of Twit.tv).

According to Llewellyn’s website, Youtube has become a place where he posts videos a lot.  This is truley a person who has his feet in both the old media and the new media.  But what the hell does “old” and “new” media mean?  Obviously it differentiates between television, newspapers, radios, and Youtube, blogs, and podcasts.  My question is why? Why should we label the media we watch/listen to as old and new?  To me it doesn’t make any sense.  As much as I would like to see it, New media is not going to replace old media anytime soon.  There are a lot of people that trust sources that have been around for over a decade.  And yes these sources know their stuff and can write well, but how well do they know there stuff?

I believe that a blogger can do a much better job with reporting on certain things.  Take technology.  Most news shows have no idea what they’re talking about when it comes to technology.  They like to throw around terms like “hackers” just to scare people and created Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD).

The problem with bloggers lies in neutrality.  Bloggers have issues staying out of the conversation because they are writing about what the love.  Take me writing about this for example.  I obviously have a bias being a blogger (though I only blog for the sake of blogging), but I support “old media.”  I listen to NPR.  I watch TV shows and sometimes even read a newspaper.

I don’t rely on these as my only sources of news.  I also have 178 RSS subscriptions in my RSS reader (creating 142 unread feeds from the past hour currently).  Some of these feeds are in fact from old media though.  Most of it is from new media.

Why do I still use the terms Old and New media even though I don’t like them?  It’s an easy way to distinguish between the online and offline news.  Though those worlds have collided in many senses, it still needs to be differentiated somehow.  I like everything equal, but this is not going to be one thing that is.

Tags: Blogging, Media, News, Technology

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 8:56 pm and is filed under Geek, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.