Silicon Insider: MSM, Meet the Blogosphere

Oct. 27, 2005 — -- The sea! The sea!

Please excuse the bloggy style of this column, but I'm writing it on short breaks between meetings. As you read this, I am in New York City co-hosting a conference.

It is officially entitled "The Oxford & York Media, Communications & Technology Summit" -- but it really is the first annual summit meeting between Mainstream Media and the blogosphere. For that reason, the panelists range from senior executives at Reuters, the Financial Times, Forbes and Sony BMG Music to, on the other end, folks from Yahoo!, Odeo and AdventuresofChester.com. The audience, largely composed of CEOs and advertising executives, is equally diverse. The goal is not to throw spitballs at each other (which has largely characterized relations between the MSM and blogosphere in the past) but to see if there is some common ground where the two can work together.

Frankly, they have to -- each has something the other needs to survive. The MSM has the money and the infrastructure. Over the centuries, it has perfected the art of converting print into dollars. But the MSM is also in trouble, losing both customers and legitimacy at a shocking rate. The recent circulation scandals among the nation's leading newspapers, the Dan Rather/"60 Minutes" fiasco, and now the astonishing self-destruction of The New York Times, show just how desperate and troubled the MSM has become.

What the MSM lacks, the blogosphere has in spades: energy, momentum, and a growing audience. But what bloggers lack is money -- bloggers have yet to find an efficient way to turn their hard work into revenue … and until they do, blogging will always be a lonely sidelight, vulnerable to dying with the next missed mortgage check.

Natural antagonists, the mainstream media and the blogosphere now need to find a way to work together -- or both the news and publishing professions will find themselves in an even worse crisis than they are in now, and all of us will be the worse for it. That's why this summit is over-subscribed, and last minute sign-ups were still taking place even as I got on the plane yesterday.

Though the topics today cover everything from evolving revenue models to piracy, and the social impact to new media versus old, easily the most anticipated event at the summit was last night's keynote speech by Roger L. Simon. Simon had already enjoyed a successful career as a novelist (the Moses Wine detective novels) and screenwriter ("Enemies: A Love Story") when he discovered the then-new world of Web logs.