The last leg of the IAMAI conference revolved around the Traditional Media and New Media, a topic that has been discussed more often than not. The panel consisted of

• Surya Mantha, Chief Executive Officer, Web18
• Mariam Mathew, Chief Operating Officer, Malaya Manorama
• Sanjay Trehan, Chief Executive Officer, NDTV Convergence
• Piyush Shah, Head - Internet & Mobile, HT Media

Sanjay Trehan, who was well the 1st one in the conference to mention social book marking sites like dig, and delicious and move beyond the much spell bound orkut, strongly mentioned that Individual Talent is a threat to traditional media. He believes there is a change in mindset and the traditional media who have always been gatekeepers of content need to change. “There has been extreme fragmentation of audience. There is a change in customer expectation; we need to interact with them. It’s a question of engagement. If you cant beat them you join them. New media is an economy of minds.” Believes Sanjay Trehan.

While Mariam Mathew, thinks otherwise. She believes that Individual Talent is not a problem. She believes it will work as a synergy. “What has changed is the way we look at media, now our views/readers are telling the angle required.”

Agreeing with Mariam, Surya Mantha to believe that Individual talent is not a threat to traditional media. Piyush Shah believes “the Individual now has power. What Traditional media need to do is stop thinking of themselves as a newspaper that has a website.”

Defending his statement Sanjay Trehan justifies “The reason the individual talent is a threat is because it challenges the conviction of traditional methods. For eg, the most digged stories on digg make it to the top, these stories are voted for (digged) by people.”

The discussion then skimmed over how individual talent helped cover the floods in Oman recently and in earlier times the London Bomb blasts. Traditional media are going to experiment with paid models. During the discussion live video streaming was said to be the reason of high bandwidth costs. The funny part was plagiarism was covered. It is more than evident that it takes place, for an instance what happened with WATBlog it self.

So I’d like to keep the discussion open. What do you’ll as reader think? Is individual Talent a threat to Traditional Media? Would love to hear your opinions.

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