Quietly, an era ends for news media

Here's a pundit touching on what I wrote Tuesday in The Other Edwards Casualty. However, he doesn't go as far as I did when I argued the Edwards sex scandal metastory was a major milestone marking the end of Big Media. Instead, he claims what's been lost is the mainstream media's ability to define what is and what isn't a legitimate news story (he is, after all, a dead tree journalist). The writer even goes so far as to state that the story wasn't "real" until ABC news made it real. See what you think:

From the start, the Edwards scandal belonged entirely to the alternative and new media. The tabloid National Enquirer had done all the significant reporting on it – reporting that turns out to be largely correct. Bloggers and online commentators refused to let the story sputter into oblivion.

True. But here's his conclusion:

With that admission, the illusion that traditional print and broadcast news organizations can establish the limits of acceptable political journalism joined the passenger pigeon on the roster of extinct Americana.

So what's really happening to Big Media? You say emending, I say it's ending.

Let's call the whole thing off.