People who go to a site because they have to or because they’re just poking around are the Latent Publics (similar to people who sit back and read blogs and comments but don’t join in the conversation…)

Maybe we’re getting closer here?

From my own experiences in training journalists to work in video – 99% of them get it, want to embrace it, but then get back to newsrooms where editors don’t understand it and in some cases simply don’t want change – forget the camera sonny.

I remember working in TV documentary on 16mm film when video hit – people ignored the looming change, clung to traditional notions of craft, ‘broadcast standards’ and forms that were long established. It was painful for many, still is. I get the impression form speaking to various senior figures in UK TV that they like to project that embrace of the singular, whilst being wedded to the core of the traditional – it’s who they are, why shouldn’t they – i’m only 38 and I still have to fight the tradition that I spent my formative years learning in. In looking to the future, we have to consider a world where those who embrace this singularity now have become the grandees and those who feign an embrace of it are gone. The terms of debate will have changed from those in these comments. Brian C’s predictions have actually happended, they are already gathering dust in some places.

I’m struck by what my 8yr old does at school:

Animates in 3d on a Mac, uses a PC for research on the web, gives powerpoints to his class, can easily use a digital camera or SLR and operate a video camera. He may go to uni in 10 years or so – will it be able to cope with the ways he may wish to express himself? Can the masters and the audience cope at present with what those who embrace singularity know is possible and are not allowed to do? We need an organisation brave enough to try everything, even become one and the same with it’s audience – let’s really see what happens in the mix – yes it means abandoning much more than tradition, it means changing identity.

Surely I wasn’t that rubbish.

But then that was 1996 and the idea of vjing, websites cum radio was NOT to be entertained.

Today, it’s all the same ones and zeros really – in a manner of speaking.

(If you’d gone to CUNY, you’d have learned all these tools….:-))

I just looked at your impressive resume and I do think you prove the point yourself: You worked for The New Yorker doing podcasts. Right there, you’re cross media. Now you weren’t (yet) reporting or writing Malcolm Gladwell’s stories but I’ll be you and the magazine wanted him to get digital recordings of his interviews, thoughts, and discussions for audio — something that was unheard of even when I worked with The New Yorker as it started going online. Your presence there bringing audio into the print domain was a sign of progress.

We are arguing at cross purposes. I am not saying that there will not be talented, very experienced, and very well-trained specialists and experts and masters and artists using any of the many tools of media. So we don’t disagree about that.

But I am saying that it is beneficial for people to learn more tools because they can learn them and use them. I assume you’re not against that.

So let’s please call that a middleground.

Matt, No offense to your profession but it pains me to see PR folks ahead of press folks. That should be a lesson to the latter.

not to sound shrill, but PR ? journalism.