The big blog

Whippersnappers and curmudgeons. That’s the dialectic this week, it seems, in regard to media. Then again, that’s always the dialectic. New media versus old media is…well…old news. But when the fight gets nasty, or the casualties start to pile up, it’s time to take notice again.

Setting the tone, if not actually fulfilling the technical definitions, is the continuing feud between John Stewart and CNBC (and financial news in general). Now, this is an intra-TV battle, with both combatants part of the same old-media stalwart, but Stewart’s hipness quotient and youthful following, together with the calling-out-the-emperor quality of his attack, give his side a new media vibe. And the dismissive, arrogant umbrage of NBC Universal’s Chief Executive Jeff Zucker certainly smacks of out-of-touch, old-style, ivory-tower entitlement.

But words will never hurt you; if it’s sticks and stones and real damage you’re looking for, let’s turn to newspapers. Because one of the nation’s best, the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer, published its last print edition on Tuesday and is shifting its operation entirely to the internet. The Christian Science Monitor just died, too. And last month, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver published its final edition after almost 150 years. And don’t forget, the New York Times is nearly bankrupt, and the Los Angeles Times already is.

Meanwhile, in sunny Cupertino, Apple held its iPhone 3.0 event this week. On the same day the Post-Intelligencer ran its last edition, Apple announced that there are now more than 25,000 applications in its App Store, which is still less than a year old. And the total number of app downloads so far? Eight hundred million.

If old versus new media is indeed a battle, it certainly seems clear who’s winning.

All of which suggests that your company is hopelessly behind the times if you haven’t already run your last ever newpaper ad and your IT department isn’t hard at work developing a custom iPhone app to engage your audience with some sort of social-networking, Web 2.0, interactivity-on-demand strategy.

Or maybe you’re a real maverick. Maybe “versus” isn’t your kind of mentality. It could be that you don’t think of your audience as a monolithic herd narrowly defined by a single psychodemographic. You might believe that you have customers who both read newspapers and own an iPhone. Most daring of all, you might embrace a hopelessly outdated term like “integrated marketing,” and employ actual knowledge about your customers when you decide on the best media mix to reach them.

If so, you might like to know that we at Big are pretty non-partisan about this stuff, too. We’re all about what works, regardless of what the zeitgeist vaguely suggests. So when you’re ready for your first combo newspaper ad/iPhone app campaign, give us a call. Or a poke or a tweet or a text.