Traditional media need to invest in content to face future with confidence

WHY is it that traditional journalists, when asked to review new media, invariably begin with a ubiquitous, “well, I don’t use Twitter myself but …” before launching into a sneering tirade decrying it as a cyber hellhole populated entirely by illiterate goons who happily spend each waking hour directing a torrent of libellous abuse at high-profile innocents in the hopes of making their mascara run?

Bloggers, tweeters and those who post on internet fora such as boards.ie and politics.ie are scoffed at, sneered at and, generally, treated with the same sort of disdain that one normally reserves for those drunken idiots who think nothing of dropping their pants and defecating in the middle of the street after a night out. In fact, I’m sure I’ve seen that exact metaphor used to describe much of the material that can be found in internet forums.

The jailing last week of a 21-year-old Welsh student who decided to cap a day spent drinking by logging onto Twitter and posting racist slurs about footballer Fabrice Muamba, who remains in a serious condition after he collapsed at a recent FA Cup game, has only served to copperfasten the keyboard-warrior stereotype of the social networking site.