By Chong Chee Kin

WHEN celebrity-gossip website TMZ.com broke the news last week that megastar Michael Jackson died, the world sat up and took notice.

Here, you have an upstart beating traditional media giants to a great scoop.

In so doing, the spotlight is put firmly on the divide between the New Media and traditional media - the subject of a conference organised by public- relations firm, Ogilvy, here last week.

The conference brought together veteran journalists like former Straits Times reporter Arti Mulchand and bloggers like Daryl Tay, who helms uniquefrequency.com.

Mr Thomas Crampton, a former New York Times correspondent and now Asia-Pacific director, 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy, summed up the divide best when he said that traditional media suffers from attention deficit disorder.

On the other hand, New Media suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder.

I couldn't agree more. Traditional media like newspapers try to be everything to everyone at the same time.

On the other hand, bloggers just zero in with the fanaticism of a zealot on just one thing and ignore everything else.

Take, for example, what's going on here. Blogger Steven Lim, who dubs himself the 'world's most handsome guy', somehow manages to turn a tribute to MJ into a plug for himself. He ended his tribute by giving out his mobile number, along with an impassioned plea to what I reckon would be his adoring female fans.

"I would like to know you. I would like to find a girlfriend... If you like me, call me," he implored, after ripping his T-shirt off and jiggling to MJ's Thriller.

To call it insensitive would be like calling the recent Air France Flight 447 crash over the Atlantic Ocean a minor mishap.

I have nothing against the New Media or citizen journalism.

For every Steven Lim, there is a civic-minded Singaporean who is concerned for his neighbours.

I have lost count of the number of times citizen journalists on Stomp kept the authorities on their toes on issues such as crime and poor service.

The New Media is here to stay and citizen journalism is an integral part of it. But is it truly better than sliced bread, as it is touted to be?

I don't know.

What I do know is that it is all too easy to be seduced by the rants of some netizens.

Journalism may be many things to different people, but it is not, and should never be, about catering to the popular perspective. What galls me is how some popular bloggers run purportedly investigative pieces without the most basic of facts.

It rankles me no end to see how some netizens bought into such commentaries hook, line and sinker and then zealously proclaimed the populist perspective as The Truth.

But a commentary is cheap.

As a veteran American journalist and broadcaster once put it, a commentary is an opinion.

Every one has an opinion, so who is to say one is better than the other?

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