The editor of the Financial Times, Lionel Barber, has written a form of a lament for traditional media in his newspaper's weekend supplement.
The power is shifting inexorably to new media, he says, pointing to the U.S. election campaign as principal evidence of the arrival of the bloggers and other citizens who create content for new media. The public crusader of the Watergate era may have led to too much self-centredness by media, too much introspection for a craft that didn't merit it.
Traditional media lost touch with its audience as technology arrived to permit a new player entry to the field. The U.S. press, in particular, could not break its conservative ways to think differently (U.K. journalism, with its willingness to mix opinion and reportin in newspapers, fares better). While it's unclear if new media can become trusted intermediaries, Barber suggests that may have been a fiction of old media, anyway.
