Tim Porter channels the conversation at yesterday's Museum of Television and Radio meeting on blogging as media in his A New York State of Mind, and led me to -- once again -- realize that no one gets what is happening in media today like Jay Rosen (although Tim is close):

Jay Rosen: The production model of doing the news - still operative in most news organizations - worked but it is an "intellectual disaster." Two years ago I wrote:

"To produce newspapers in this manner requires efficient, repetitive action - papers are scripted in advance, before the news happens; reporters are told how long to write, before they cover the stories; photographers are given dimensions of an illustration, before they take the pictures. This way of working discourages innovation and encourages rote behavior. At a time when journalists are better educated than ever before, it is ironic how many of them still work on the factory floor." [Read: Shutting Down the News Factory.]

Another pointer provided by Tim led to Terry Heaton's blog, where another Jay Rosen quote struck me:

[from Terry Heaton's Pomo blog]

Jay Rosen said something terribly important that (imo) went over the heads of most people in the room. He said the nature of authority is changing in our culture, and that this directly impacts all media. He used the example of a person who goes to the doctor and gets a prescription for an ailment. The doctor explains how the medication will work. The patient then proceeds to the drugstore and receives the medicine, along with (perhaps) an explanation from the pharmacist about how the medicine will work. But then the patient goes home and gets on the internet to research the thoughts of others who've used the medicine to discover what THEY think about how it works, and this impacts the doctor's authority. The doctor is still the doctor, but gone is the automatic acceptance of his or her words as gospel. This is new in our world, and I couldn't agree more. It's the major challenge of all institutional authority, and it's one of the truly fascinating things about a culture drifting into postmodernism.

This is perhaps the best thumbnail characterization of the impact of social media on society I have read. People are looking for authoritative perspectives on issues of importance to them, and the large, established institutions -- like the medical system, capital M media, governments, and so on -- have become suspect. We look to ourselves, through the Internet, our third space, to find the answers to our questions. Individuals, through first person perspective, command authority in such a context, not large organizations. It is the organizations, and their chronic failures of trust, that have led people to look elsewhere. As a result, the trappings of old style authority -- association with a national newspaper or media network, government agency, or other professional associations -- does not confer trust or credibility as it once did: on the contraray, it may arouse distrust and even contempt. In the postmodern era, it is the individual, true voice that is trusted, and that trust is the result of hard won respect arising from a long period of open public discourse. The best bloggers exemplify this trend, like Jay, for example.

Tim made a seemingly offhand observation, that really underscores the subtext of the meeting:

There are a lot of scarily smart people in the world thinking about how use technology to keep journalism intact as a business.

Even as wholesale changes sweep through mainstream media -- like the fall of "production journalism" -- entrenched players will try to retain as much as they can of the trappings and legacy of journalism. Even if media becomes completely reformulated by the impact of the Internet and social media, they will try to retain as much control as possible, even in a world where the context of authority and legitimacy have been completely upended.