Mark Cuban, charismatic owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, is an extremely popular blogger and web personality.
Mark spends a lot of time commenting on the impact of emering social (or consumer-generated) media on mainstream media, and recently wrote an excellent entry on the relationship (or divide) between blogs and what we understand as ‘traditional media’.
Here are some of his key points:
In traditional media, you are first defined by your medium – “There is a cost vs time vs interest vs access series of constraints that determines who your audience is, how
you reach them and what they expect of you. Over time, that has evolved our media into very defined roles”, says Cuban. However, blogs cost nothing to create. Blogging is personal. It is a tonal factor that most distinctively divides the two media: “Traditional media
has become almost exclusively corporate while blogging remains almost exclusively personal”.
Another key factor to blogging is the varying roles one author can take – and the subsequent diverse audiences it attracts. I can identify with Mark on this one. I write very differently for my MoneyWeb blog, my Citizen Op-Ed and my other blogs, but all the content invariably gets posted here. So you as the reader are offered a pastiche of journalistic flavours from conversational-informal to print-formal.
One last great quote from the man:
“Traditional media goes to work, bloggers live their work.”
Mark Cuban – Blogging vs Traditional (Mainstream) Media
