A Media Tipping Point?

Glenn Harlan Reynolds wrote on Tech Central Station Over three years ago, I wrote:

Big journalism is in trouble, and big journalists don't like it....Annoyance to journalists is the least of this, because what is really going on is something much more profound: it's the end of the power of Big Media. Thanks to a technological revolution (movable type then

Actually it is Moveable Type now, along with WordPress and other Blog software

, the Internet and talk radio now), power once concentrated in the hands of a few has been redistributed into the hands of the many.

Since then, an army of Davids has delivered blow after blow to the media goliaths: From the debunking of "the brutal Afghan winter" to Jayson Blair, RatherGate, and more, bloggers and stand-alone Internet journalists have repeatedly shown up Big Media bias, laziness, and ineptitude.

That's not news, though it's a lot more obvious than it was in early 2002, and the trend has been pointed out in books like Brian Anderson's South Park Conservatives, Hugh Hewitt's Blog, and studies like this one from the Pew Internet Trust.

What is news is that now the old media outlets are declining in market share, to the point where Jeff Jarvis says that we're at a tipping point.... The march of media evolution won't stop for the benefit of blogs, and I predict that within a few years blogs as we know them today will have changed dramatically. But there's much more to new and alternative media than simply blogs -- and, regardless, it seems clear that the media world of the next decade won't look much like that of the 20th Century. Given the disappointing performance of the media Goliaths, that's probably just as well.

Bill @INDCJournal: blogged Reynolds gets testy, and rightfully so.

Personally, the Times has literally zero credibility with me; a large portion of the the news and all of the unsigned editorials are totally unreadable. And that's actually saying something, since I still highly recommend the Washington Post, in spite of its own passel of offputting flaws.

You know, just mentioning it. Again. It's kind of amusing how a blog that's been in existence for slightly more than a year can go from OUTRAGE! to utter dismissal of a news outlet. Even through the prism of my personal evolution, I'd still say that this is a pretty good sign that the NYT's power and influence are severely diminished.

I have rarely seen unbiased articles in either NYT or WaPo