Indispensable Old Media

INDISPENSABLE OLD MEDIA
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Susan D. Moeller and Moisés Naím]
[Commentary] Over the weekend, at almost the same time that the world was informed that Google was vying to pay $1.65 billion for YouTube, a 2-year-old video-sharing website, famed Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was gunned down in Moscow. Politkovskaya covered human rights abuses in Chechnya. She was also a vocal critic of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and Russian authorities consider her death a political assassination. YouTube's acquisition and Politkovskaya's killing are unrelated events. Yet both offer powerful clues about the forces shaping the way information is produced, distributed and consumed in today's world. YouTube epitomizes "new media" -- their immense potential and surprising effects. Politkovskaya represents "old media" -- their literal struggle for survival and also their historical, indeed indispensable, value. There is no doubt that new technologies are changing the way all of us get and understand information. The trend is toward actively "searching" for what one wants to watch, read or listen to rather than passively taking in whatever editors or producers select. The fascination with the transformational effect of all this makes it easy to forget what is essential to the information process: traditional "old media" messengers such as Anna Politkovskaya. YouTube, Google, Flickr and many other websites offer valuable tools for keeping the world informed. But they are not a substitute for Politkovskaya and her colleagues. Societies are judged on how they treat their most vulnerable citizens. We suggest that added to that calculation should be whether journalists have been threatened, assaulted and killed. Tell us how many journalists were assassinated in your country last year, and we will tell you what kind of society you have.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-moeller_naim10oct10,1,4001534.story?coll=la-news-comment
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