“The Internet has mainly been seen as a derivative medium, certainly in the eyes of mainstream media. Are blogs the first real example of us moving away from this?”
This was a fascinating question posed over some beers/lemonades by Kevin Anderson (no link – get a blog, man!).
He’s a great guy, despite being a journalist. And an American. Joke :).
Rather than reveal what we both had to say on the matter, I’m going to save this for a forthcoming podcast.
But it is a valid point. Take the BBC News website – for all it’s success, is still a derivative of the BBC’s TV and Radio news-based output combined with “The Wires” (Reuters, AP, etc).
As a journalist, ahem, I must quote the original source of this thought. Neil McIntosh from Guardian Unlimited actually said that to me over lunch in the BBC Foyer. He said that blogs were really the first form of journalism born on the internet, or something to that effect. But, my dream is that we actually start treating the Internet as the unique medium it is instead of using it to simply distribute content created for other media.