Eric Schwartzman | New Media and Social Media Communications

What Daniel Okrent misses in his column in the New York Times is that the Net is the driving force behind the MSM’s wider adoption of commentary is its value proposition in the age of technology-driven, immediate online news.

On the difference between news and opinion….which Noam Chomsky says better than me…is the notion that by empowering, through a hierarchy, individuals to decide how and who they will cover the news is in and of itself an act of subjective filtration. But on the flip side, in my view, while the source of the news on Yahoo! News or Google news may be determined by the deals they in place to reproduce the news from disparate sources, the placement and collection of the articles is handled objectively, by computers.

But the real issue here is the impact of the Net on newsprint. Just the A.P. moving colorful leads to its clients — acknowledging it too is getting beat out on breaking scoops by electronic formats, the NY Times is looking to provide “distinctive coverage of a widely covered event.”