It doesn’t get much more meta than this. Dan Lyons, real reporter for real old news weekly Newsweek but blogging as the person pretending to be the real CEO of apple, but with a nudge nudge wink wink to all those in the know, today writes a piece that could have been in CJR or some other real media publication looking at the relative merits and demerits of the way two news outlets have covered Zynga. You can read it here. I have no objection to his thrust – that TechCrunch did a significantly better job than the NYT in covering the story. So stipulated. But here is where Dan is missed a key point:
What really cracks me up is how often I still hear people say that bloggers are mere “aggregators” and the “real journalism” gets done at places like the Times.
Um, Dan? TechCrunch is a news organization, and anyone who thinks otherwise isn’t paying attention. Ditto for GigaOm, for Engadget, Gizmodo and so on. Real reporters, doing real news. However you want to define it.
What’s changed is not the journalism, it’s the underlying business model. There will be plenty of journalism in the future. But it will look at the business and staffing level more like TC than NYT.