If you were going to pick an epicenter for mainstream media, The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz would not be a bad place to land. With his running scorecard on Beltway journalists, his interviews of other scorekeepers on his “Reliable Sources” show on CNN, and his ceaseless fascination with network news, Mr. Kurtz embodied the folkways of the traditional press.
Until last week, when he announced he was leaving his privileged perch to become the Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast, a two-year-old toddler of the new digital press conceived by Tina Brown and owned by IAC, run by Barry Diller. Mr. Kurtz’s lane change evinced gasps reminiscent of when Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.
On the heels of decisions by Howard Fineman of Newsweek and Peter Goodman of The New York Times to go to The Huffington Post, it would seem like a bit of a tipping point.
Phi Beta Iota: Robert has it half right–news you can use. The value has shifted from the T in IT to the I in IT. We told NSA this in Las Vegas in 2000, but the money is in the T not the I, so they ignored us. Public Intelligence about everything is about to emerge as the new arbiter of value. True cost will be known, transparency will expose corruption as well as waste, and there will be, as our friend and mentor Alvin Toffler has written, a PowerShift.
