Thursday, March 27, 2008

Let's go to the tape

Today's New York Times carried a story about a paradigm shift. The preference for having unedited video to look at and play with, alongside your news story.

“We’re talking about a generation that doesn’t just like seeing the video in addition to the story — they expect it,” said Danny Shea, 23, the associate media editor for The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). “And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message.”

Slate magazine thought that was pretty obvious.


Back to the past: Yesterday, in a column that surveyed the way people get political information from the Internet, the WSJ's Lee Gomes went mid-'90s on his readers to talk (of all things) e-mail technology. The paper noted that e-mail is "an easy and effective way for people to share ideas with friends about what might be going on with the candidates." TP thought it couldn't get much worse than that, but then today's Page One (!) NYT story comes along, where Brian Stelter reveals that (brace yourselves here) people, and more specifically "younger voters," are "not just consumers of news ... but conduits as well." That means these young people send out stories and videos to their friends, who often share stuff as well so they all keep each other informed. "In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth." Exactly.

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