Are they coming to us or are we coming to them?

The thing about meetups is that they always get me thinking. This evening at the LA Podcasters meetup, Tim Coyne and I were musing over the fact that we’ve known each other for a few years basically as podcasters, and yet here I am a magazine publisher and he was on “Chuck” last night. So here we are, two new media-types, both now operating in traditional media circles. And yet in the same conversation it gets brought up that Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are now full-time Twitterers, CNN can’t seem to go more than a few minutes without using the words “Facebook” and “Twitter” on the air, Adam Carolla has a podcast now, and so on.

In the early days of blogging and podcasting I remember much debate about whether traditional media would eventually adapt itself to us, or whether we in new media would eventually get swept up into the traditional media vortex. That’s far from settled, but we’re far enough removed from the “early days” that hindsight tells me that both of these things are in fact happening simultaneously. After all, Tim has always been an aspiring actor, and I always wanted iProng to be a magazine from day one. And the powers that be in traditional media have had a way of managing to migrate from one medium to the next over the years as needed. After all, television and radio were each considered “new media” at one time or another.

Time will tell when it comes to just where the equilibrium between old media and new media will settle once the two have spent more time funneling into each other. But the one inescapable trend is that the funneling has commenced. The days of there being a metaphorical Berlin Wall between new media and traditional media are officially over.