Old and new clash in a struggle for dominance

Rupert Murdoch addressed the newsroom at The Wall Street Journal after his ownership of the paper became official. (Mark Lennihan/associated press)

How do we capture the future?

That's what the traditional media seemed to be asking in 2007: how best to capitalize on the Internet's spirit, capture its ad revenue, attract an audience that has come to expect things fast, loud, and free. The need to change - to move forward or die - seemed to be the driving force behind most media stories of the year. Especially the biggest one, the transfer of a feverishly old-school institution into decidedly new-school hands.

In August, the reclusive Bancroft family relented to Rupert Murdoch's high-profile courtship, allowing his News Corp. to purchase Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal. Murdoch talked a lot, in the early days, about respecting the paper he hoped to buy. But as soon as he got his hands on it, he started preaching change. Some staffers are already gone. Others are worried. At the Journal, and across old media, uncertainty prevails.

Why shouldn't it? Newspaper circulation continues to drop. Layoffs and job freezes persist. And new media are changing the tenor of the national conversation. For instance, blogs affected the presidential race this year, adding voices and ideas to what was a closed circle of cognoscenti, says Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research.

"It's not like blogs have taken over," says Bernoff, who studies social networking and the media. "But there is no monopoly on widespread political opinion. And if someone comes up with something that's catching, it will get into mainstream media."

This year, the Internet also proved its power to amplify the news. It's unclear whether Don Imus's April radio transgression - a vicious rant about the Rutgers women's basketball team - would have gotten as much attention if it hadn't been blogged about and replayed on YouTube ad infinitum.

But in 2007, new media also showed limitations. Those online bells and whistles, it turns out, don't always add much value. The much-touted CNN/YouTube presidential debates drew respectable ratings, but as innovations go, they were a bust: The questions might have been cheekier, but they weren't any more profound. It was the same old town meeting, just a little more high-tech.

New media also proved susceptible to fraud - maybe even more so than old media, since the Internet values speed and attitude over objectivity and corroboration. Back in April, the CBS Evening News fired a producer who had lifted text for a "video diary" from The Wall Street Journal. (Of course, print journalists can have poor ethics, too. This year, the "Baghdad Diarist," a soldier who wrote for The New Republic, turned out to have invented scenes of wartime brutality.)

And while some high-profile websites came into prominence this year - such as the star-power-driven Huffington Post - they didn't diminish the role of traditional media outlets, notes Alex Jones, director of Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

"They are wonderful for opinion," Jones says of the new sites, "but they have not yet demonstrated any but the most sporadic interest in reporting."

Still, opinion is popular, as are many trappings of the Internet. Traditional media are increasingly taking on features of the new, adding updates, blogs, videos and attitude, and making more pressing the question of how to pay for it. This year, The New York Times ended TimesSelect, its much-touted experiment in paid online content. It turns out readers are more likely to accept ads than to pay for a subscription.

Over time, we can expect, the kinks will get sorted out, the revenue models will solidify, and old media will change into something of a hybrid. Newspapers might look less like papers and more like conglomerations of blogs. TV news will develop even more of an online spirit. Still, as old embraces new, some fear that the basic function of old media - watchdog, investigator, pillar of democracy - will be lost in a sea of microtargeting and snark.

Jones laments the hyper-local new approach of some smaller newspapers, which he says are covering local tee ball games more aggressively than local city halls.

"I'm not worried about newspapers staying in business," he says. "I'm worried about them selling their souls."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com