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Nisenholtz vs Jarvis: The Middle Ground of Journalists vs Bloggers

By Rafat Ali - Sat 17 Mar 2007 05:18 PM PST

Online Videos by Veoh.com
(RSS readers will have to click through to see the 10 minute video).
This was at the OPA Global Forum last week in London...I was sitting behind Martin Nisenholtz, the CEO of New York Times Digital, and recorded this with my Nokia N80. It is a nuanced argument, something which doesn’t really come out in this video, or Martin’s argument there. Here is my read on it: Martin thinks Jeff Jarvis is the extreme in this journalism vs bloggers debate--especially when it comes to mainstream news sites working with bloggers and aggregating and pointing to them, working with them, and bringing them onboard--and was trying to point to a middle ground, something which he thinks NYT is doing, when in fact Jarvis is that middle ground, if you peel the layers behind some of his hyperbole. Either way, it is an important argument, though some of it is pure theater, done for the sake of it.

Posted in: Companies, NYT, Social Media

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From Jeff Jarvis Sun 18 Mar 2007 04:14 AM

Yes, to the theater. But Martin and I agree we were also disagreeing about something more fundamental or at least refreshingly different from the old blogger-v-msm debate. We were arguing about the centralized-v-distributed models of media: Yahoo as an example of the old, centralized model (’we control content and market to bring you to us and then give ads here’) and Google is the example of decentralized (’we go where you are so your pageiew is our pageview and thus we enable you to do what you do’). Martin is arguing that some media brands—yes, the Times—are worth coming to. I’m arguing that all brands need to ask: WWGD—what would Google do? How can we go to where the people are and create a wider network of quality to do more than we could have done alone? Or at least this is how the discussion continued in Treo-to-Blackberry email afterwards.