It's not quite a Bloggers and Old Media lovefest yet, but at least people seem to have eased up on the 'us vs them' rhetoric. AdAge.com has a nice article explaining why Blogging vs. Traditional Media has been oversold. Scott Karp's recent post entitled Bloggers Are So Wrong About Media raised some hackles, but in a follow-up post he explained that (in his view) New Media has the conversations but Old Media has synthesis. As I emailed Scott, I think he raises some interesting points - but I still don't quite agree. 

I'd argue that new media does have synthesis mechanisms - both human-powered and automated. As an example of the former, blogs like paidcontent.org and Ypulse provide comprehensive coverage of niche sectors. There are also tech-driven synthesis solutions such as search engines (Google, Technorati, etc), Digg, memeorandum, etc. None of these 'new media' synthesis solutions are perfect by any means - indeed just last week Digg dug a hole for itself when many of its members falsely (and largely anonymously) accused an O'Reilly writer of theft. But this new media world of blogging and aggregators is evolving rapidly and synthesis is one of many things that continues to improve.

Overall though, it's no longer a case of Old Media vs New Media... actually I don't think it ever was. As I mentioned above with paidcontent and ypulse, human-powered synthesis still has a very big part to play. Old media brands have the resources and brand strength to create powerful Web synthesis solutions, should they so desire. But it's no longer just old media playing the game - the rest of us can play too now ;-)