Take Note: your blog may go mainstream

Posted on July 6, 2008
Filed Under Blogroll, networked society, politics |

Found it!  I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the past week looking for a string of word that had caught my attention at a bad moment and, well, on paper, not on screen.  Yes, I was looking at Time Magazine, the traditional sort, and somewhat misplaced it.  This is why I wanted it back. I had seen a James Poniewozik’s column (here’s the digital version) in which he defined the legion of “bloggers and YouTubers” as “a diffuse army of the uncredentialed, uninhibited and-most terrifyingly-unpaid.”

This was, I thought, a very well rounded and accurate description and I wanted to make sure that took note. However, Poniewozik–who comments on media and popular culture in his Time.com blog and Time Magazine–talks about the challenge this “army” poses for the besieged journalsim profession:  Tim Russert’s death heralding the end of the age of megajournalists with enough power to set the agenda.

Hmm… is it so?  The massive quality of the mainstream media (on-line or off-line) is still a deciding factor in the public arena, possibly even more so  now that all media can be made into digital stucco.  Attention  is the hot commodity. Ariana’s Huffington Post blogfest may have broken two hard stories of the Democratic Primary (Obama’s “bitter” comments, Bill Clinton’s “scumbag” rant against a reporter) but ultimately the story “made it” because it was picked up by the massive, mainstream media.  That seems to remain as the point of validation.

We should be talking about “agenda sharing” as a substitute for the traditional notion of ”agenda setting” but not just as an attribute of the traditional media.  After all, aren’t we all competing for attention? May the Huff Post never become so massive that it goes mainstream. 

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