‘New Media’: Ready for the Dustbin of History? is an article in today’s NYTimes Week in Review.
Mr. Diller and others have come to realize that two things succeed commercially on the World Wide Web: searching (like Google and Yahoo) and shopping (like Amazon.com and eBay).
Is that what the digital revolution has come to? Back in the mid-1990’s, it was going to cause a media revolution.
Steve Lohr, the author, then goes on to write off the efforts of AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal, and the media-focused efforts of Microsoft… all because commerce is the be-all and end-all. When you write a perspective article, and you refer back all of 6-10 years, I think it’s a bit early. Yes, journalism may be the first draft of history, but maybe the jury is still out? Of course, I’m biased. I work at a media company founded for the internet… in retrospect, at least. We’ll see. I’d like to think we’re still making history — though we can’t tell whether we’re going to like the story yet.