From a Washington Post column by Daniel W. Drezner headlined “Everything old is new again in the mainstream media”:
See if this sounds familiar: The mainstream media is broken. These gatekeepers are panicked about losing their power because of the emergence of cheap ways for people to communicate directly with interested readers….I am writing, of course, about 2002.
Back in the day, there was the mediasphere and the blogosphere and a whole big debate about what this divide meant. I should know — I was one of those folks who grabbed a Blogger account and started writing because of my difficulties getting an op-ed published. I was not atypical: Most of the first generation of bloggers that gained followings were either academics writing for a public audience or former columnists and editors experimenting with the blog format….