SCHWARTZ CROSSROADS

When New Meets Old: Symbiosis and Contention

This weekend, both the New York Times Magazine and the Boston Globe Magazine offer glimpses into the way new and old media continue a symbiotic, if sometimes contentious, relationship. They are also prime examples of why a solid public relations program must balance both sides.

Over at the Times, blogger Emily Gould writes a long and very personal cover story outlining her trials and tribulations in the public spotlight, thanks in large part to her personal and outspoken blog posts on Gawker.com. This piece is the definition of irony, offering up mea culpa after mea culpa and self-defining as an “over sharer” even as she over shares some more.

But the irony goes beyond the text itself into the subtext. Take, for example, the fact that it is written for the New York Times Magazine, an old-school publication to the Nth degree. Then there is her simple one-line bio at the end that states flatly “Emily Gould is a writer in Brooklyn. This is her first article for the magazine.”

Oh, right, she’s just another writer with no real following.

Gould didn’t take her own growing celebrity seriously until a disastrous appearance on another old-media stalwart: Larry King Live, which on that day was guest-hosted by Jimmy Kimmel. The clip gained even more prominence when it was distributed on the new-media powerhouse YouTube.

To convince her therapist that she was, in fact, a celebrity, Gould brought in a New York magazine article on Gawker and read allowed from it. Even a breakup happened on old media, with her boyfriend writing a long article for the New York Post Sunday Magazine, the nation’s 13th oldest newspaper and one founded by Alexander Hamilton.

Also telling is the comment from Magazine Editor Gerry Marzorati, who told Media Bistro that in the first six hours on the Web (where the story was published before being seen in the printed magazine) the article nabbed more than 600 comments. The fact that this is a cited as a sign of success points out that things they are a-changin’ at the venerable publication. I still wonder how many of the Times' readers will sift through all the Web reaction and how it will get filtered back into the main discussion. 

Still, the back-and-forth nature of the discussion shows how stories that develop online move into the mainstream media, and those stories in the mainstream media blend back into the online world. To do PR properly you must be firmly planted in both of those worlds.

Then there is Seth Mnookin, who wrote a cover story for the Boston Globe Magazine that attempts to dissect the seemingly-exorbitant $200 million Newton North High School. As this is my home town and I blog on the issues regularly, this is very close to my heart. I’ve written my thoughts on the subject, but more importantly are those of the rest of the residents, including some of the people interviewed for the piece.

If you look over on the Newton TAB blog, you can see people taking shots at Mnookin. It gives a much clearer view of the piece, or at least adds facts that allow the reader to have a better understanding of the debate that exists within the city.

But, my guess is that few readers will ever see those comments. Sure, they’re there as additional facts for someone doing research on the subject, but as far as the winning the hearts and minds of the broader populous, those comments aren’t going to help.

This is the fundamental flaw with the “self correcting” theory of Web 2.0. The idea is that the crowds will correct inaccurate presentations of "the facts," which is oftentimes true. The problem is that most of those corrections happen in forums that are frequented only by the most ardent. So unless the Globe goes back and writes another cover story, the battle is already lost. The issue is not correcting the stories for everyone, but correcting it for the right audience.

So the question is, which audience is more important? If the goal is to win the hearts and minds of the whole of Massachusetts, then Newton will have to influence the coverage in the mainstream media, something it's already doing by having an active forum. If the goal is to influence the local audience, then the forum is the perfect place because it speaks directly to that audience.

As Brian Solis noted in his much discussed entry on TechCrunch, a key "secret" is to identify the key audience, only then can you actually speak with that audience. So while these two examples are great macro discussions, the question for both Emily and for the City of Newton is: what audience really matters?

Posted by Chuck Tanowitz on May 28, 2008 at 5:40 AM
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