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We live and work in exciting times - revolutionary times. Technology continues to recast the media industry.

The extraordinary advance of affordable personal digital technology and the stellar rise of social networks are both distrupting and transforming the media market making this a unique moment to be involved in the convergence sectors we focus on.

This is also our place to ruminate and comment on the world as we see it, we hope you enjoy and please join in.





Wednesday 22 July 2009

FT snarls at Blogs

I was surprised (and delighted) to see the FT's Lex column baring its teeth today.


The object of their ire this morning was blogs. Not all blogs (they don't doubt the popularity of the media 'upstarts') but certain high profile political blogs like TPM and Huffington Post.


Why so cross?


Well, FT is frustrated by these types of blogs who win awards and attract lots of attention, but 'riff' much of their content on mainstream news stories published by 'desperate old media companies'.


Not stopping there the FT also reminded us just how limited blog audiences are compared with those for traditional media outlets.


Whilst the FT stopped short of outright criticism they left us in no doubt of how they felt in general about blogs.


Couple of things struck me about this Lex piece:


1. Overall the FT's tone was quite defensive and reactionary using words like 'upstart'. Not classic FT ‘high ground’ positioning.


2. Also rather surprisingly they continue to choose to distinguish between old/traditional and new media. As we posted yesterday (see post below) we feel its high time we did away with these tags. So called new media has been around a long time etc and surely its all media now.


3. That said its great to see a newspaper of note engaged in redressing the facts of the media market. The facts are that although popular and in certain cases authoritative blogs are still small compared to the newspapers like the New York Times. Its high time the newspapers stopped being so defensive about their own assets and influence and got on the offensive – as we have said on this blog many, many times before.



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