The coming death of old media?

At ABCNews.com, former Forbes ASAP magazine editor-at-large Michael S. Malone writes that big media may be dying while the blogosphere grows in importance. (Warning: 7-second forced display ad that you can't close.) Excerpt:

This not the way the press is supposed to behave. The First Amendment gave us journalists unique and unprecedented freedoms — but those freedoms came with equally great responsibilities. I can forgive the story itself — I well know what it's like to be on a big investigation, and how the taste for blood can make you do crazy things — and settle for the censure of and an apology from Rather and CBS. But there's no forgiving the subsequent cover-up.

The heroes of this story are, of course, the denizens of the blogosphere. The Pajama Press has won. They have been the welcome counterweight to the increasingly unbalanced message being purveyed by the MSM this political season. I've written a lot about these folks in the last few months, mostly with admiration, but mixed with a little fear. Their power and influence has been building now for several years. ...

Rathergate is proving to be the apotheosis of the New Media. It was certainly unexpected, but these changings of the guard always are, as we in the tech world know well. And this, too, of course, is a technology-driven revolution in journalism taking place right before our eyes.

You are going to hear a lot about this changing of the media guard in the days and weeks to come.

Try years.

This is an important piece, for while many of us in the blogosphere have written about the ascendant power of citizens media, few in big media have acknowledged the trend.

Malone asks, "now is the time to ask if the Pajama Press can, in its present form, supplant — better yet, improve upon — the existing mainstream press?"

He also predicts -- wrongly, I think -- that within the next year the blogosphere will establish "professional standards and organizations" (not likely) and aggregate "into larger sites that can generate enough revenues to pay for permanent jobs and dedicated reporters" (if he means full-time jobs, that's years away at best).

Let's ditch Malone's cutesy phrase, the Pajama Press; that aside, it's not yet time to bury big media. Mend it, reform it, yes, but as we've said before, participatory media will rise up alongside traditional media, and they'll become increasingly dependent on each other. As Joe Trippi says in the current issue of Wired magazine, "The blogosphere has become fundamental -- the plankton of the information ecology."

Yes, brawls will break out -- usually occasioned by big media arrogance, as in Rathergate -- but few bloggers I know believe it will be a better world if newspapers, magazines and TV networks disappeared from the face of the earth.