Congratulations! You are the person of the year

by Daysha Taylor, December 19th, 2006, 7:00 am

In a bold move, Time Magazine has dubbed “You” as its “Person of the Year.” In the end, though the opportunistic attempt to align the magazine’s image with the buzz surrounding the Web 2.0 craze may prove to be the next source of mockery from the digital peanut gallery. By associating themselves with the digital community, traditional print publications may just be setting themselves up to be burned by the blogosphere. 

While companies like The New York Times, Guardian Newspapers, and Gannett Co. (publisher of USA Today) fight to keep their share of advertising dollars by beefing up their digital operations, the open-source community has whizzed past them by providing a content base that seems to expand exponentially overnight. Sites like MySpace and YouTube boast user counts that render newspaper and magazine circulation numbers comical in comparison. As a result, advertisers follow. 

Reference book publishers realized that they have something to worry about, too, after a study by science journal Nature found Wikimedia Foundation’s Wikipedia to be no less accurate than the Encyclopædia Britannica. Large media, publishing, and broadcasting outfits have attempted to answer the call for more interactive interfaces by adding blog and forum sections to their site indexes. But, faced with declining advertising revenues, most traditional companies have not bought the technology necessary to bring them up to par with that of the current free-blogging world. They also don’t have the credibility of the hip newcomers.

CNET Networks’ News.com product, for example, split its content so that online-free users can comment on every news stories it publishes. Posts are put online immediately, without much administrator review. Blog aggregator Technorati skips the editorial, opting to clock the most blogged-about articles on the Web.   

Time’s article is certainly timely but you have to wonder if the mag is being too candid for its own good. As Greg Verdino wrote in his blog, “It is a sure sign that the culture of consumer control has truly taken hold when even an old media stalwart like Time magazine sees fit to celebrate the trend.”