There were three different stories in today's (Sunday's) Washington Post dealing with new media.
On page one was a story on the future of recorded music formats, predicting that ten years from now most folks will just download files from the internet (using services such as iTunes), rather than buy it on disc (and cassette tapes? they'll be long gone). You'll be able to arrange (or search) the music how you like. Being able to find a particular song when the mood strikes me sounds cool; losing album cover art (the inevitable side effect of format-less music) however would be a definite loss. Even with CDs, there's so pretty amazing cover art being done.
On the metro page, where technical or digital stuff rarely appears, there is a story about how the internet breeds a culture of lowered inhibitions leading to a loss of civility online, with folks "flaming" people that, in person, they would treat with the utmost of civility. At the same time, by providing a paper (or Google) trail, folks are increasingly held accountable for their statements. This was the case of Joseph Steffan, the hatchet-man for Maryland Republican governor Robert Ehrlich, who spread rumors about Baltimore mayor Martin O'Malley having an extramarital affair. Steffan is now out of a job, thanks to that paper trail.
Then in the Style section there is a story on bloggers, who helped a couple of other people lose their jobs in the past week. Eason Jordan, CNN's chief news executive, stepped down after suggesting that U.S. military personnel in Iraq were targeting contrary journalists (the number of journalists killed in Iraq by coalition forces is disturbingly high; nevertheless, Jordan did a dumb thing). Meanwhile, on the lefty side of the blogosphere, a conservative blogger, code-named Jeff Gannon, who attacked the Senate Democratic leadership was "outed" as a hypocritical homophobe by liberal bloggers (he owned the domain name "hotmilitarystuds.com") who had gained special privileges from the Bush White House. The story hear seemed to be one we've been hearing in the past year: how bloggers are breaking more and more stories, and how old news media is following their lead.
And I forgot to mention the few articles in the business page (apparently the new Napster blows), and the usual reviews of video games and such in the Sunday Source. I bet if I looked in the Sports section I could find a new media connection.
The story for me is not just the prevalence of bloggers but all new media in the old media of newspapers. I'm glad newspapers are covering new media because, frankly, I'm still quite fond of newspapers and would rather read about a lot of new media than to "do" new media at this point.
Then again, it seems every day something comes along that chips away at my incipient luddism. For instance, I just ordered an iPod online, when such a thing would have been unthinkable a year ago. I am ever closer to being assimilated...
Posted by jeb at February 13, 2005 10:24 PM | TrackBack