The tectonic shifts transforming the media and advertising landscape have always been fascintaing to me a stand as one of the central areas of focus of this blog. And while the earthquakes and volcanos along the fault lines are worthy of the headlines they grab, I am equally intrigued by the smaller events and more subtle (and not always so subtle) tensions that are constantly taking place as the traditional media plate gets subducted underneath the new media plate. This subduction zone seems to be generating peak activity these days (I’ll save the record-length list of story items for another post) and has now even been put to music. Mad Avenue Blues is a little long, but for anyone in the media, advertising, search, web, or tech/software business, it’s worth watching in its entirety.

(Thanks Lief for the link)

As usual, I have fallen behind on my posts and am resorting to the easy (and somewhat lazy) tactic of posting headlines that caught my eye over the past few weeks.

• As if print media didn’t have it tough enough these days, distributors are clamoring for a price increase to get magazines onto the newsstands. With the recent slate of titles that have been eliminated and many titles on the ropes for lack of advertisers, this battle couldn’t come at a worse time for either side.

• The Stanford Group is bullish on big media’s ability to weather the current storm. Too bad that the current economic typhoon pales in comparison to the tectonic shifts taking place in the industry. They might last through one, but both?

• Lee Enterprises gets a waiver on its debt covenants, allowing the beleaguered company to delay the inevitable.

• Meanwhile, Gannett’s problems continue to get worse with a Q4 revenue drop of over 22%

• And the seemingly intractable conundrum of growing web readership and declining overall revenue continues to confound.

• Luckily, Henry Blodget has a plan to save at least the New York Times. It appears to be as sound as anything I’ve seen, and far better than management’s lack of any clearly articulated plan and the gradual (or rapid depending on your perspective) decimation that will eventually crush the paper. The details can be debated ad nauseam, but Blodget’s basic premise is absolutely accurate, and I cannot, for the life of me, understand what is keeping newspaper companies from implementing something along those lines. The current issues were obvious at least as far back as 1993 (thanks Jim), and the solutions are just not that complicated. They may not be enough, and it may be too late, but a hail mary at this point cannot possibly hurt any more than throwing in the towel and taking the hit.

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.