The Empire Strikes Back

Scooped by “ordinary citizens” (once again), and called to task for largely ignoring one of the biggest global news stories of the year — “old media” is fighting back.

The big story of the last ten days has been the important role that online tools, such as Twitter, FriendFeed and YouTube, have been playing in empowering Iranian citizens to protest and communicate.  A constant sub-theme of that story has been traditional media’s failure to initially cover the story.

Even now, as traditional media organizations have been “blacked out” by the Iranian government, people across the globe are relying on user-generated videos, tweets and posts to get their news.

The old media elites see the writing on the wall. They are obsolete. An outdated empire that hasn’t yet figured out how to adapt to the new realities of the online world.

So they’re fighting back.

Stories are starting to appear that discount the role of online tools in the current crisis:

This Washington Post story proclaims:

“No amount of Twittering will force Iran’s leaders to change course, as supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made clear Friday with his rebuke of the protesters…”

That’s just absurd.  Nobody is saying Twitter is the end-all, be-all of the current protests.  And it’s crazy to measure the power of these tools solely on the basis of whether or not the despotic Iranian government “changes course.”

These protests would be large and effective with or without Twitter.  But they are important tools that are empowering these protestors to communicate with one another and the outside world to tell a story that isn’t getting told anywhere else.

Also this week, longtime Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page wrote of the Iranian protests:

“To me, Twitter is the great enabler for those who are intent on doing what’s ruining literature and political discourse today: Writing without thinking.”

Well, that’s an interesting statement coming from an opinion columnist who makes a living writing … about what he is thinking.

I can understand why the titans of old media would feel threatened.  If millions of consumers are getting their news via tweets, re-tweets and FriendFeed posts — then they’re not getting it from the pages of the news organizations’ ad-revenue-generating Web sites.

Further, I seem to remember a ton of news stories touting the vital role that “social media” played in the Obama campaign last year.  Not too many stories (none that I can remember) labeled the campaign’s online activities “overrated.”  That’s probably because the media played such a vital role in that victory — no need for them to feel quite as threatened.

But this is different.  Old media’s failure to cover the Iranian protests has become a story in and of itself.

Rather than lash out, these traditional media organizations should instead adapt to fill the wide-open gap they have left in recent years.  That is, (as we wrote in this previous post) their large scale failure to produce, aggregate and disseminate content in a manner that adapts to the ways in which we are consuming media and information.

If they fail to adapt, that gap will continue to be filled by ordinary citizens, corporations, organizations, and campaigns empowered by an increasing amount of simple, free online tools at their disposal.