The result was that the exclusive report was ultimately picked up by World Net Daily, one of the largest internet news sites around, and the findings are being followed up by official investigators.
Flagrant Harbour, a stylishly written, on-the-pulse weblog written from the exotic sub-equatorial mania of Hong Kong this week followed up some excellent research into a local businessman by the name of Jonathan Hakim. Late last year, the author of Fragrant Harbour spotted that Hakim, former scion of the Hong Kong internet industry and founder of Boom.com, was involved with a company offering cheap and quick transplants from a military base in China. Hakim this week contacted the author and had an in depth conversation with him about the nature of his naivety of the dubious ethical dimensions to the enterprise, all of which was well reported with gripping linguistic alacrity in this week’s edition of the weblog.
Disruption
The reaction from The Fourth Estate to this new form of media has been nothing short of hysterical: the responses of professional media pundits have been everywhere from embracing to abusive.
Glenn Reynolds, founder of Instapundit and author of An Army of Davids, sees weblogs potentially changing the landscape of journalism; “I think that blogging is the wave of the future, and consequently, I think we’re going to see journalism moving from a profession, back to being an activity,” he writes on his newly formed weblogging organisation, Pajamas Media. He continues:
We used to say that a journalist was somebody who wrote a journal, and a correspondent was somebody in a distant city who wrote you letters, and corresponded. Now it means somebody with good hair and a microphone. But I think that the traditional meaning of journalism is what it’s going to be like again … It’s more a case of who’s on the scene and who can report — or journal — what happened, as opposed to somebody who makes a profession out of reporting and opining. So it’s driven by the activity; it’s driven by the nature of events, rather than by your paycheck, if that makes sense.
The answer is, it’s increasingly starting to make sense to a lot of people, and it especially makes sense given Professor Christiansen’s model of technological disruption in industries.
In the illustration, extracted from a seminar given by the professor at the Oslo Business Summit, low-end technological disruption feeds on both markets where there is no current demand and markets where customers are already over-served by too much supply. What is most disturbing for industry professionals about the above model is that ‘sophistication’ has little to do with it once more convenient architectures enter the game.
Article comments
1 - Mr. Real Estate
Very interesting post with some very good points.
-John Mudd
2 - Lisa McKay
Daniel, this article is an editor's pick this week - congratulations!
3 - Josh Wills
Daniel, interesting article- I had a different take over at my blog:
4 - AST
How long have conservatives been complaining about liberal bias in the MSM, and how long have the MSM been in denial? Rush Limbaugh was the first to really capitalize on their failure to serve a huge audience segment. Then other talk shows. Then Fox News.
The MSM just don't listen or think. This is what journalism schools produce and the sooner the big media figure out that they need more diversity, both political and social, the sooner they'll save their butts. If I were running a newspaper, I'd go back to training my own reporters and avoid J-schools like the plague.
Meanwhile, blogs are eating their lunch, demonstrating every minute of the day that people without journalism degrees can think, write and persuade, unhindered by the templates imposed by those programs.