Pandora, one of the most phenomenal web companies ever, is at risk of buckling under the weight of the ridiculous internet radio royalty rate hikes recently imposed by SoundExchange. Pandora, powered by its music genome project, serves up music tracks after you enter a single song that you like. It’s amazing technology and a dream site for anyone interested in music. Pandora has extended itself into the mobile world through its iPhone app that literally streams music to your iPhone. And now, they might disappear. What an absolute shame.

After yesterday’s post about Buzz Bissinger’s juvenile, uninformed, and totally off-base diatribe against DeadSpin and blogs in general, I found a very interesting interview that Bissinger gave after his appearance on Costas Now. It seems as if Bissinger has seen the ‘new media’ light (perhaps only faintly, but he does see it – or at least he’s pretending to see it). It’s a good read on why journalists and old-media media pros need to understand what is happening in the subduction zone (read yesterday’s post).

According to a recent Nielsen study, people are spending less and less time on newspaper web sites. While a few sites like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have seen average time spent per month climb, most metro newspaper sites are seeing people spend less and less time on the site each month. This trend stands in stark contrast to magazines which have seen steady increases in web traffic and reader engagement. Given the fact that most daily newspaper sites suffer from poor design, weak search functionality, web 1.0 features, thin content, non-existent innovation, and bland, ‘me-too’-type offerings, the Nielsen findings are not at all surprising. The web will do very little to help stave off the daily paper’s inevitable march into oblivion.

With increasing frequency, seismic shock waves have been reverberating through the media world, grabbing headlines and shifting the way people think about the drastically altered landscape. These might, for example, include daily newspapers announcing massive layoffs as they inch closer to bankruptcy, the introduction of technology that allows people to rent, download and watch feature-length movies on a cell phone (I still am dumbstruck by the iPhone), presidential candidates announcing their VP choice via email directly to campaign supporters, or a blog network being sold for $30 million, etc.

But what tends to get overlooked are the constant, growing tensions between old and new media that precipitate these larger 6.5-type earthquakes. It is these front-line battles, these competitive skirmishes, these seemingly one-off incidents where the actual transformations are taking place day in and day out. Like a dense oceanic plate being subducted underneath a more buoyant continental plate, old media’s subduction beneath new media is occurring all over the place at all times in large and small ways, but often beyond the sight of most people. The earthquakes and volcanoes grab the headlines and shock people into recognition of what is happening, but the smaller events can be just as fascinating to watch.

Two such events have caught my eye recently. The first is a wildly entertaining debate between Will Leitch of the enormously popular sports blog Deadspin, and Buzz Bissinger, a sports columnist and author of Friday Night Lights. Taking place earlier this year, the debate between the relative merits and value of blogs versus the newspaper, and the role that blogs are increasingly playing as a source of news, information, entertainment, and media content, occurred on Costas Now and was moderated, as best it could have been, by Bob Costas himself. It is incredible to witness so visibly, the massive, irreconcilable chasm that exists between old and new media. It is well worth the time to watch it.

The second incident, similar in nature and equally as hypocritical but with far less sparks, centers around the brewing battle between bloggers and the Associated Press about citation and fair use. It is, yet again, another example of the pathetic, futile, and sometimes even laughable attempts by old media to stop the forces of plate tectonics.

So while the big earthquakes grab the attention, it is just as fascinating, and perhaps even more interesting, to watch the smaller events that are taking place within the subduction zone. It is particularly enjoyable to watch a myopic hypocrite like Bissinger arrogantly, and with flawed logic, dismiss new media and bemoan the future of sports journalism (and perhaps even society itself) in the hands of people like Will Leitch as he and the newspapers he writes for get crushed down into the lithosphere.