Old-school and new-school media collide at CES?

by on January 17, 2007

Renee Blodget, Silicon Valley PR queen, notes that press rooms and other places were a lot more crowded at CES due to more bloggers.

It’s interesting times we live in. The thing is, four years ago Engadget didn’t exist. So, in the rules of the old-school, they would never have gotten a “seat” at press conferences. Today they are the ones with millions of page views. I do note that not getting into press conferences didn’t keep Engadget from getting some of the best news at previous events. Peter Rojas and team worked their asses off last year and this year they covered CES like no one else has.

  • Robert...I heard that quite a few MSM reporters visited the BlogHaus...true?
  • Yes. Houston Chronicle. Newsweek. New York Times. Financial Times. and others were at the BlogHaus.
  • Cool!!!
  • Engadget is not a blog but an online publication that is MAIN STREAM MEDIA (MSM). They had 14 people covering CES and AOL pays them fat wages. They are NOT bloggers but MSM journalists employed by big corporation - AOL.

    Maybe Robert you could give a chance to genuine bloggers like Todd from http://geeknewscentral.com who were covering CES with videos on their own and doing good job. Engadget on the hand covered many topics only in a shallow way and without videos...
  • CSB brings up a good point...at what point is someone MSM. Where is the crossover line?
  • ET
    On the most recent TWIT, Dvorak seemed to really like the BlogHaus thing.
  • Old school and new school meet this weekend at the NC Science Blogging Conference, http://wiki.blogtogether.org - lots of journalists, teachers, scientists and others coming together to explore using blogs to promote public understanding of science. And check out the anthology of best science blogging 2006, out just in time for the conference. http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/01/the_scien...
  • Remember the fictional audio that predicts Googlezon? In it the New York Times ends up as a "newsletter for the aged and privileged". Too soon too say that all MSM (of today) will end up in such a situation. Some may actually make the transition away from paper based daily/weekly schedules for publication after all.

    I think the better distinction is between media (old or new) that are popular enough to make enough money to completely fund themselves vs those who are doing it as a "hobby", or a labor of love.

    I personally was interested in the Nokia N800 as much as any other device announced at CES and the best coverage of that was from individual who ordered them after they went public and did hands-on reviews. I don't even know if some of these people even attended CES.

    Too much of the CES coverage, for my liking was about CES itself. LOOK at the crowds, LOOK at the size of this room, LOOK how big the Sony kiosk is this year, we REALLY had a good time getting drunk last night and the food in this hospitality suit was much better than that one.

    As a couple of true techies observed, CES has probably outlived its usefulness. All these product announcements, product comparisons and testing and so on could be done online and you could achieve the same hype by convincing most of the companies involved to hold off any new products until the middle of January (but I rather doubt that would happen).

    CES is in fact a remnant of what makes the MSM (in the way you and most people are using that term) a thing of the past. It was in fact a mechanism where scheduled print journalists could have special issues of their magazines etc and run up advertising rates for the big CES "special edition", etc.

    Were it not for CES a number of products would probably have hit the streets a month or more sooner and still other products would still be getting finishing touches instead of being rushed out too soon to make good impressions.
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