We Media - Interactive Internet Journalism Is Already Here
In an excellent piece, Dan Gillmor at Columbia Journalism Review talks about the decay of authoritative, one -way journalism. We have been talking about new technologies and paradigm shifts for so long that the traditional media has become complacent. But just because the terms has slipped off the screens and pages, doesn't mean that it isn't happening. Blogs are a whole new approach to online "content" that are NOT part of traditional media models and certainly at odds with their business models. Combine Blogs with WiFi nearly ubiquitous access and you get this;

In my own case, I've found that my readers definitely know more than I do, and, to my benefit, they share their knowledge. At a technology conference last March, a telecommunications chief executive groaned onstage about his troubles. I noted this in my Web log, which I was updating from the audience via a wireless network link. Soon I (along with Doc Searls, another journalist-blogger), got messages from a reader in another city. The reader included hyperlinks to an authoritative Web site showing how the executive had sold stock worth more than $200 million while his company was suffering. We both immediately posted this information. Some in the audience were soon reading our Blogs, and the mood toward the CEO seemed to chill. Talk about real-time feedback.

Where did this come from? We have been talking about virtual communities, about interactive media etc, but those with a vested interest in the old ways of doing things had no real interest in enabling that. As long as the Internet could be cast as just another form of one to many media channels, the media companies were happy. Slowly they are waking up to the reality that this is not so. Clay Shirky has an excellent couple of essays on the issue, Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing and Broadcast Institutions, Community Values