Brave new media world

WashingtonPost.com, one of the better online ‘mainstream media’ sites, has announced their headfirst dive into the the new media world of the interactive community by allowing reader comments on all of their articles. This is a move I consider both brave and a no-brainer.

On the one hand, their status as the nation’s de facto #2 paper (after the New York Times, of course) makes them both media aristocracy and big fat target. This means the Post, simply by covering a story, lends that story credence in the world of media. But in this new day of blogospherical impact, any part of a story that might betray bias or even lack of evenhandedness immediately becomes an epicenter of controversy. By allowing comments on all of their articles they have given the swarming hordes the flypaper they (we?) so desperately crave.

On the other hand, that very willingness to give voices to their readers is exactly the principal which makes new media so much more compelling that the one-way mass media broadcasting and publishing that defined media in the 20th century. Staking their place in the new media landscape marks them as courageous. It will, I am sure, drive more traffic to their website. This same phenomenon, by the way, is what is behind the rise of what Markos Moulitsas calls ‘people powered politics’, and is something that has the power to change our nation and world for the better.

So here we stand at the precipice of a sea change in media. A waterhsed moment, we witness a blue-blooded media outlet diving headfirst into the blue-collar sea of blog comments. Sounds like fun to me!