Rex at Fimoculous posts this insightful conclusion to the end of his post on launching new Dan-Abrams-published meta-media site Mediaite:
If you hang around in the NYC media bubble long enough, you develop the social depression of a collapsing industry. The west coast is full of a giddy frisson about the inevitable demise of big media, while the midwest is skeptical of everything that gets force-fed to them from the coasts. NYC, which has essentially zero awareness of any of this, continues to constantly be shocked! when a TMZ or Pitchfork or The Onion comes along from the hinterlands with a massively successful enterprise.
The reasons for this amounts to a lack of vision. Even smart people, vampirically bound to the past, seem completely blind to developing new formats. The standard for online innovation right now is “launch another blog,” which no one seems to recognize is about as depressing as launching another newspaper.
Sign One that Mediaite will be smarter than HuffPo: this Jeffrey Feldman column that turns Nico Pitney vs. Dana Milbank into Marshall McLuhan vs. Thomas Jefferson. Me likey, Jeffrey. Me likey a lot.
2 comments
I have to say that I think Elizabeth Spiers’ response is worth reading. Link here.
Sure enough. Although I’m not sure whether her rejoinder (esp vis-a-vis Pitchfork) doesn’t just reinforce Rex’s idea that the response has mostly been, “wow, that’s really interesting. We don’t do that here.”