Old Media, New Media, Data Media: Evolving Publishing Paradigms

It is not so long ago that we routinely talked of Old vs. New Media. The “Old” was characterized by the investment in and creation of content, which in turn gave rise to a common set of properties — definitive and authoritative journalism and scientific reports, the fixed text, the pursuit of the finest authors and (in media beyond scholarly communications) the top creative talent. Old Media was analogue. New Media, on the other hand, was digital and had its own set of properties — the dynamic text, interactivity, user-generated content, and the emergence of the platform metaphor, upon which content created by others would reside. (There is an overlap in this summary and the thesis of Tim O’Reilly’s classic essay “What is Web 2.0?”)