Who publishes the best content?

Who offers the best original content: traditional media or new media?

The old guard has an unfortunate habit of painting the interlopers as leeches, remixing and stealing gold from their franchises.

To rigorously and scientifically look at the creation issue, I analyzed my last 100 tweets that contained an original article link (i think we can agree this a random sample of wildly diverse and enthralling material, which has been judiciously filtered for quality). I only included articles that featured original reporting, analysis, and/or expert commentary. The results:

51 links to new media (such as blogs and niche content sites)

49 links to traditional media websites (such as the wsj, nyt or wired)

But, you say, what about the quality of those links? I'd say the quality is about even. What the interlopers lack in reporting scale, they compensate for in unique insight. For instance, many of the new media articles are posts directly from the author's own blog or from aggregation sites (such as techcrunch, huffpo, or seekingalpha) who the author uses for distribution. These authors are subject matter experts, whose content gets "bottled at (or near) the source".

Let's go deeper into the quality debate and look at content as a total value proposition. In most of my consumption of content, I don't literally look for "originality". I first prioritize: relevancy, accuracy, timeliness, insightfulness, comprehensiveness, personalization, and readability. I highly value original thinking, but find that most original content doesn't have much. I look for insight.

Original thinking is priceless and I think the edge in this regard is likely also shifting (or shifted?) to to the new channels. In many cases, expertise is more vertical than the traditional channels can effectively manage-- and that expertise is rapidly migrating to the new channels that bring more flexible and vertical distribution.