December 4, 2003

Pushback

I was thinking a little more about this post yesterday - about an essay on Jeff Jarvis' blog about how technology such as webcams and weblogs are rendering the media's current methods obsolete - as I helped a professor at the university where I work set up his own weblog.

I work in the university PR office writing press releases and encouraging the media to write about various events here, and to include university faculty as "experts" quoted in news stories. I also have begun helping faculty members set up weblogs, and maintain a blog about blogging. The first, Dr. Jeff Cornwall's The Entrepreneurial Mind, is beginning to get noticed in the economics-and-business niche of the blogosphere - and has already been noticed by the local business press, which reported its launch and, in the case of one local business publication, republished one of Dr. Cornwall's posts as an op-ed.

The media world is being transformed by blogs and other technology that is increasingly pushing the power of the "press" into the hands of individuals. A few years ago, the big Internet content buzzword was "push," as Big Media and the tech industry focused on ways to "push" content over the web to Internet surfers. It was a top-down, force-feed, audience-as-passive-consumers broadcast model. "Push" bombed.

Meanwhile, Blogger and others launched the weblogs niche, the price of digital cameras fell to affordable levels, digital video cameras dropped below $1,000, webcams became cheap and cell phones became cameras, empowring the audience in ways unprecedented in the history of media. "Push" as envisioned by Big Media may have bombed, but there is a "push" happening in the news business.

The audience is pushing the content - by linking to and highlighting obscure news articles, digging up facts and data that run counter to the major media spin, "fisking" news stories for bias and error, and publishing its own coverage of news events by blogging first-person accounts increasingly accompanied by digital photos, audio and video.

The media has been pushing its audience around for years. Now, the audience is pushing back.