Time Magazine-- one of the icons of traditional media-- named "You" as its "Person of the Year." With a reflective piece of Mylar on a computer monitor screen as the cover, the editors rejected newsmakers such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld or the new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi in favor of You Tube and the millions of bloggers and amateur journalists and YouTube contributors.
Richard Stengel, the Managing Editor of Time, wrote by way of explanation:
"The other day I listened to a reader named Tom, age 59, make a pitch for the American Voter as Time's Person of the Year. Tom wasn't sitting in my office but was home in Stamford, Conn., where he recorded his video and uploaded it to YouTube. In fact, Tom was answering my own video, which I'd posted on YouTube a couple of weeks earlier, asking for people to submit nominations for Person of the Year. Within a few days, it had tens of thousands of page views and dozens of video submissions and comments. The people who sent in nominations were from Australia and Paris and Duluth, and their suggestions included Sacha Baron Cohen, Donald Rumsfeld, Al Gore and many, many votes for the YouTube guys."This response was the living example of the idea of our 2006 Person of the Year: that individuals are changing the nature of the information age, that the creators and consumers of user-generated content are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy." (my emphasis here)
Heady stuff for those of us who blog, who read blogs, who have recognized that the significance of YouTube (perhaps about to become the generic term for any user-content video sites, the way TiVo is often used to mean any sort of personal video recorder) just more than just silly pet tricks. Another cause for urgency for change for traditional media.
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