Wise Buddha

An interesting experiment last night by CNN to link with YouTube and give us a prime time TV glimpse into citizen journalism - to fuse big media journalism i.e. CNN with ‘new’ citizenship social web type journalism i.e. YouTube. You would think listening to all the hype about this that these tools were about to unseat old school media. I think it was a good effort in a sense aside form the fact that Anderson Cooper is positioned as the ‘cool’ journo able to engage youth etc. yeah right! If anything it underlined the fact that in fact although it pains me to say it old media and in particular traditional media is essential in order to provide the level of questioning and scrutiny required. It was obvious that the candidates fended the questions easily. The BBC has a good overview on the event here and I agree whilst and interesting exercise I don’t think the big media corporations need to be worrying too much today. Don’t get me wrong I am all for participation in the political process and the social web can play an interesting role in encouraging participation but it has limitations which became clear last night.