The Most Powerful Publishers in the World Don’t Give a Damn

There is a meme you maybe won’t remember, from a different internet epic, that goes like this: Are bloggers journalists? It was a real question that became a joke because it’s the kind of thing someone would ask now only with a wink of nostalgia for the naiveté of an earlier time, when terms like hyperlocal and blogosphere were used in earnest.

The web itself was different then, and the way people thought about the changes it would bring were different, too. The focus was on the individual. The mantra was: And our arrival in this shared tech utopia was, we were told, liberating beyond our wildest dreams. It would make us smarter, and faster, and freer in all the ways had promised (“Have you ever sent someone a fax from the beach? You will!”). And it did, in so many ways. But even the curmudgeons of the old school, editors and print-media devotees who chafed at the speed of internet journalism, or thumbed their noses at those they perceived as not sufficiently ink-stained, were focused on the wrong disruptive forces in those early days.