Keller, Huffington, And The Remassification Of Media

I read two argumentative posts this morning, one by Bill Keller, the NY Times Executive Editor  and the second by Arianna Huffington. Keller started the hair-pulling by writing a column, in which — after a long build-up about his throw-weight as a Lion of Media — he complains in an aggrieved tone that Huffington lifted some of his observations about the future of media:

Bill Keller, All The Aggregation That’s Fit To Aggregate

The queen of aggregation is, of course, Arianna Huffington, who has discovered that if you take celebrity gossip, adorable kitten videos, posts from unpaid bloggers and news reports from other publications, array them on your Web site and add a left-wing soundtrack, millions of people will come. How great is Huffington’s instinctive genius for aggregation? I once sat beside her on a panel in Los Angeles (on — what else? — The Future of Journalism). I had come prepared with a couple of memorized riffs on media topics, which I duly presented. Afterward we sat down for a joint interview with a local reporter. A moment later I heard one of my riffs issuing verbatim from the mouth of Ms. Huffington. I felt so … aggregated.

In her rejoinder, Huffington details with dates and locales, the same thoughts she had espoused for years prior to that joint interview with Bill Keller, stopping along the way to dis him about all the talent he’s lost to her, and how much bigger AOL’s readership is:

Ariana Huffington, Bill Keller Accuses Me of “Aggregating” an Idea He Had Actually “Aggregated” From Me

The trouble for Keller is that this viewpoint, right down to the use of the word “convergence,” is one I had been expressing to describe the changes happening in the media for years.

For instance, in May 2008, two years before the Milken panel, I told the Star Tribune, “I think that what we are seeing is a kind of convergence of the mainstream media doing more and more online, and those of us in online media and the blogosphere doing more and more reporting, along with citizen-journalism projects.”

In November 2008, 17 months before the panel, speaking of the media’s coverage of the ‘08 race, I told Reuters, “There’s this real convergence, where basically you found that the best and most accurate rose to the top, whether it originated from Time magazine or from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com, which did not exist before the election.”

And in January 2010, three months before Bill Keller’s “memorized riff” on convergence, I told Canada’s CTV, “And then we can have a hybrid future where there is a convergence between old media and new media. It’s not an either/or world.”

Indeed, as far back as March 2007, over three years before the Milken panel, I wrote a post outlining my take on what was happening in the media world: “Those papers that wake up in time will become a journalistic hybrid combining the best aspects of traditional print newspapers with the best of what the Web brings to the table.”

So who was it, Bill, who was “aggregating” someone else’s ideas?

In this interchange, Huffington comes out looking more like the diligent reporter, fact checking the provenance of the ‘convergence’ meme, and who likely uttered it first. She’s obviously the better counter-puncher of the two, at least.

But the idea that they are fighting over is fairly humdrum, so the whole thing is almost laughable. Mainstream publications are adopting the tools and sensibilities of online media, and there is a ‘convergence’ as both sides move toward the new blendo mainstream. Yawn. Sounds like two hipsters arguing about who listened to some cool band first.

From the perspective of a longtime online media observer and participant, this convergence is the stripmalling of the web, where pioneering socially-scaled advances — like blogging and social networks — are being repurposed by old media companies. They are taking these tools, and in a sense, using them against us. It’s wolves in sheep’s clothing: they use online content management, they put up an area for comments, and allow us to share and like through Facebook and Twitter. It seems like we are talking among ourselves, but it is all done in these gigantic mall-sized, privately-owned semi-public spaces, and they are so mass scale that most voices are crowded out, aside from those of the owners and their staff.

We will have to start talking about socially-scaled media, I think, to distinguish it from this convergence into remassified and superficially socialized media, the sort of media that AOL and the New York Times are churning out.

I think there is still a great deal of innovation in socially-scaled media, particularly in social news tools like Flipboard and the newly released LinkedIn Today (another post in the works). In this niche we see the possibility of the long-awaited ‘daily me’ coming to the fore, where your user experience will be grounded in the specific people that you chose to follow, and much less in the hands of Huffington or Keller.

I recently wrote You Are Who You Follow arising from a Mathew Ingram-inspired discussion about online influence, but it is salient, here, again. As users of and active participants in media (I dislike the metaphor of ‘media consumption’), we have to chose what kind of media we want to follow. We can chose to be ‘consumers’ of the hybridized, remassified semi-social ‘product’ that Keller and Huffington want to create. Or we can connect to other people through socially-scaled news networks.

This doesn’t mean I won’t read anything from the NY Times or HuffPo, but the difference is that I will be following specific individuals (like Paul Krugman), specific topics (like union busting), or finding out what materials are most interesting right now to those specific people that I follow. And then I also curate, making observations, comments, reposing, and so on. And by so doing, I become an integral part of the news network, not a passive ‘consumer’ of news. I become someone worth following, not just another random reader who occasionally writes an online comment.

This may seem like a niddling difference, but it is not. Small talk is big again. And big media wants to make us small again.

related

• SHOTS FIRED: Bill Keller Accuses Arianna Huffington Of Plagiarism… Err ‘Aggregation’ (businessinsider.com)
• Arianna Huffington to Bill Keller: Who you calling ‘Oxpecker’? (news.cnet.com)
• Bill Keller Takes On Arianna’s Aggregation: Kitten Videos With A ‘Left-Wing Soundtrack’ (mediaite.com)
• The NYT versus the Huffington Post: a cat fight over kitten videos | Richard Adams (guardian.co.uk)

(Source: underpaidgenius)