Aside from posting an alliterative headline, I wanted to call your attention to some fairly incisive comments from News Corp media mogul Rupert Murdoch himself, regarding the power that user-generated news content now exerts over traditional news media (his own Fox network included). The gist of his comments, given as part of a lecture series for the Australian Broadcast Corporation, is basically this:

Before the kooky kids came and invented the Internets with all its opportunities for individual self-expression, iReports and citizen journalism, traditional media (i.e. old newspapers and the Big Three Networks) pretty much had a monopoly on the news. In the old days, if a newspaper or broadcast news editor didn’t feel a particular story was news, it simply wouldn’t run, and no one would be the wiser. Nowadays, pretty much anyone can post anything online with the potential of it becoming news—regardless of whether an “establishment editor” vets it or not. So stories that Big Media could have traditionally buried or simply ignored, today still manage to see the light of day because of citizen bloggers like you and me.

According to Murdoch, this is exactly what’s killing the relevance of entrenched traditional media (and it may help explain his own networks’ pandering catering to popular tastes: “We deliver, You decide”). If you don’t give people the news they want, they’ll seek it out elsewhere.

So watch out, Edward R. Murrow, power is now in the people’s hands and the inmates are officially running the news asylum. Paging Howard Beale…

Javier San Miguel, Associate Creative Director

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