World Wide Web War

Via Kinsella, comes today's Star article declaring "Mission Accomplished" for the mainstream media in their war with the rogue blog rebels:

We are witnessing the triumph of the allegedly extinction-bound MSM over their cyberspace detractors. The economic reality is that the 224-year old Times of London boasts vastly more "brand-name awareness," as marketers say, than the best-written, most imaginatively designed blog in the world. So do The Lancet, Paris Match and National Public Radio.

And that's separate from the newspapers' and TV news channels' vaunted advantage in newsgathering, about which we so often hear from those making the case for "saving" our endangered traditional news media. The MSM win because of their continued, far larger financial resources, ubiquity of distribution, and decades-long familiarity and trust with audiences.

So if it ever was a war – and some of the early bloggers called it that– the MSM have won it.

Well, maybe. But I don't think this is really a "win" and "lose" situation.

Olive's theory is that a lot of bloggers have joined the MSM, thereby admitting defeat. But, then, the Toronto Star has 30 blogs on their website, so the MSM has certainly joined the blogosphere in full force. Is that admitting defeat?

This really isn't a war by any means - blogs, MSM, and the MSM who blog can all benefit each other. Blogs drive traffic to news stories and news stories provide stupid articles for bloggers to make fun of content for bloggers to post about. So I for one think the intertwining of the two sides over the past year or two is a welcome trend.