Some people think David Coursey’s latest column on Podcasting, in which he swoons over having Bob Edwards on his iPod but turns up his nose at the notion that someone might want to listen to a podcast from the technology’s originators, is really silly, and if you limit your imagination to audio versions of people’s egomaniacal columns for eWeek, that seems perfectly reasonable. But if you look at it as another failing gasp for air by the demigods of the mass media world, who don’t understand the social impact of the technologies that surround them and the emerging world of independent content creators, it becomes really interesting.
—Please pardon the above riff on Coursey’s column, in which I’ve kept most of the last paragraph intact and substituted the targets of his spleen with my own italicized interjections, but he was too pompous not to deflate. What is it about print journalists—not all of them, thank God, but enough of them—that they all want bloggers to dry up and blow away? They seem so, I don’t know, threatened. I guess they can’t help it; they bought the hype that attention is scarce, and any attention paid to the likes of me (and Adam and Dave, or even Larry) somehow invalidates their existence.
Interesting proposition, that last one. Do print journalists and other media magnates still have authority if people stop believing they do?
Inspired by a link on Scripting News.