That's the message that Robert G. Picard seems to miss in "Blogs, Tweets, Social Media, and the News Business":

Judging from their widespread adoption, it’s hard to find a technology that news organizations don’t embrace. Read the Los Angeles Times on Kindle.

"Technology Diminishes Journalists’ Value"Watch ABC News on YouTube. Leave a comment on a blog about media and marketing from the Chicago Sun-Times. Listen to a podcast of “On Science” from National Public Radio. Participate in a discussion board hosted by The Washington Post about college admissions. Receive SMS news about the Dallas Cowboys from The Dallas Morning News. Get features from Time on a PDA and tweets of breaking news from CNN.

The mantra for news organizations is to be anywhere, anytime, on any platform. But is this strategy really a good idea? In an era when the business models for news are stressed, hard thinking should be done in assessing the opportunities that various technologies present. It isn’t the time merely to be copying what others are doing.

Tough questions must be asked to figure out which of the new technologies is beneficial for journalism and the business of journalism. Is each one equally useful? What are the real costs in staff time and the operating costs to be on the various platforms? What is actually achieved for the news organization in being there? Does every news organization need to be active on all of the platforms? Finally, how can a news organization achieve optimal benefit across platforms?

The answers we find might lead to deciding which of these technologies to employ.

I beg to differ. The way I see it, it's all one platform, one technology. What Picard is talking about is really a matter of context, not platform. These things he's describing are not things, not platforms, but merely doors into the big platform.

After all, all of these digital means of consuming news feed off of the Internet, and the Internet is a lot more than just a delivery system. We connect with each other in this realm. We share information in this realm. We recommend to each other in this realm. And what we do in one context appears elsewhere. It's all interconnected. Networked. Internet-worked.

In fact, the Internet is not even the thing. "We" are the thing.

It's a mistake to think of Twitter and Kindle and blogs and so on as different "platforms." They are all tools of one big machine. Different levers and buttons on the big machine.

And this is all the more true when you consider that peer-to-peer is a strengthening paradigm into the future, as Andy Oram wrote recently:

Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by companies running social networks. Whether you're a street demonstrator or a business analyst, you may well have come to depend on Twitter. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations might when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices.

Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure.

What is a "platform" if you don't have a centralized nexus? Peer-to-peer is really people-to-people. And even on centralized systems working the net, the people are the content. We value our connections as much or more than the information.

If Twitter goes down, do we miss the news? Or do we miss the messages from the people we follow and trust? We are the machine indeed. Speaking for myself, the news I miss is the news those I trust are passing along. And the news I find interesting I want to share and recommend to others, and on and on it goes.

In other words, distribution of news is increasingly done through people, not "platforms." We are the distribution machine.

So should newspapers just continue to stumble around, blindly and awkwardly trying out distribution and promotion on all these different faces of The Machine? Probably not. But it's worth looking at these contexts, these faces, not as separate things but rather access points or doorways to the same thing ... us.

I don't know, what do you think?

Update: Chris Messina has a great post that explores this theme of a people-centric web.