Just because it’s online doesn’t mean it’s new media. I’m declaring war on all old-school media that just happens to be online. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
What am I talking about? Articles like this one on Apple and music by Joshua Chaffin of the Financial Times. Here’s the paragraph that has me frosted:
The record industry, in particular, has long been frustrated that Apple has reaped most of the profits of the burgeoning online music market through sales of its iPod player. By contrast, they have earned only modest royalties from digital music sales because most of the songs on iPods and other devices result from illegal download.
The problem with the above paragraph is obvious to anyone with half a brain and a reasonable background in technology. Chaffin has uncritically accepted a music industry lie and printed it as fact. He’s participating in propaganda. He’s a lousy, lousy journalist.
Worse, he’s calling me a thief … along with tens of millions of other iPod owners. That burns me up, since I’m very careful to only put music on my iPod that I’ve obtained legally. Some of it is from the iTunes Music Store, most of it is from my CD collection. So in effect, Chaffin is slandering me.
But that’s not why I’m declaring an old-skewl media boycott.
Every piece of writing has things others will disagree with. That’s OK. But online, in new media, it’s now a reasonable expectation that readers can comment on a story. Not on the Financial Times site.
I’m declaring the boycott because Chaffin and the Financial Post don’t allow comments. In other words, I can’t post a comment disputing his facts and assertions. In the new media web 2.0 online world, this is simply unacceptable. It’s outrageous and we need to start recognizing that fact.
Having comments ability ought to be a minimum standard requirement on any website in 2007.
Frankly, this would be a major positive step for FP and writers like Chaffin – purely from their perspective. Why? They’d get a lot smarter, a lot quicker. None of us is as smart as all of us … and comments, properly implemented, can unleash some of that collective intelligence. Errors get pointed out and fixed quickly – which really is in the media organization’s best long-term interests.
So: no more old-skewl media.
And any site that doesn’t blur the traditional publisher/audience role is old-skewl.
Goodbye and good riddance.
[tags] media, ugc, ugm, audience, publisher, web2.0, comments, discussion, financial post, joshua chaffin, apple, music, user-generated content, john koetsier [/tags]
Just so you know, I’m getting paid $50 to write this review of 
OK, so I finally watched 