Chapter 3: The Gates Come Down (PDF Link)
Most of today’s politicians and business people, and virtually all powerful institutions, accumulated their status and authority in a different era. They see the news media’s traditional hierarchies reflecting their own centralized, top-down model, with distinct control points. In this model, public relations and marketing departments deal with the press and the public. Executives deal with reporters when necessary. News is controlled from within the organization and managed when outside forces intervene.
It’s an industrial age model: manufacturing news. It still works, to some degree, but it’s less and less effective. If markets are conversations, as the Cluetrain Manifesto authors have noted, then journalism—the information people need to manage their lives—will increasingly be part of those conversations.