Here is an instance of a news item that couldn’t have been made public if not for new media:

This picture is not about Fox or Digg but shows the difference between news sources that are centralized like Fox or old media and others that are decentralized - meaning that they are distributed over the web allowing any person to be a source. Let me first point out the difference between these two. Old media is newspapers or news channels which act as a central source of news to a large number of people. New media is simply media which uses the web as a distribution platform. The web enables anyone to be a source of news. It enables news to automatically reach a large number of people using viral platforms - which function as word to mouth - like Digg, Youtube, Stumbleupon, etc. If a person like me or you gets a hold of an interesting news item, we have a way to reach a large number of people easily. So, what is it that people are essentially doing if they want to read the latest interesting news items? They go to sites like Newsvine, Digg, or Youtube. And content on these sites are contributed by a large number of unrelated people. The other difference is that while old media is essentially an information pipe where there is only one direction for the flow of information from media to us; in new media, news is more of communication. Most of the bloggers go through and respond to comments to their articles, and any reader can be a blogger too where they can post a response. Since anyone can be a source of content, the lines between reader and contributor have blurred too.

It is true as the old media supporters point out, that amongst many bloggers there is tendency to “post first, check later” but then as we all know, news channels or papers are not totally neutral or even true. Also, a blogger posting a false blog is never a single source of information. There are many other alternatives that readers can look at. It is no longer a matter of which kind of media is better because with the advent of new media, the need for old media no longer remains. Content on the web is both vast and more engaging than its old media counterparts and this is the main reason that old media has to change its character to survive.