This morning I had the opportunity to spend an hour with Michael Arrington, of TechCrunch fame. In addition to discovering that our paths had crossed in an earlier life (he worked on WhoWhere's abortive run at going public while he was at Wilson Sonsini as a lawyer) we had a great conversation about the Personal Bee and the category of next generation news discovery tools.
One of the interesting topics that we tangeted off into was whether products like the Bee would be the death knell for old media. Michael took the position that the Bee (and Memeoandum and others) were an enormous threat to traditional newspapers and media companies. I have a somewhat more hopeful view.
There is no question that a failure to grapple with the new interaction-rich, re-mixable, reader-powered media tools now coming to the market will doom particular media companies. But at the same time, these traditional news-gathering and publishing enterprises do have valuable assets and advantages, and some of these companies will come to understand how to utilize these resources within the new media world.
Perhaps the best way to put this is, if you mean that the old ways of doing business within the media production and distribution value chain are dead, I agree. If you believe that this necessarily dooms all of the old media brands and businesses, I disagree. Certainly some companies will fail to make the transition (some already have failed). But some will survive and make the transition and become even bigger and more vibrant than before.
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