Interesting post from Richard Edelman on the transformation taking place in media from the second New Media Academic Summit hosted by Edelman and PRWeek last week in Chicago.

Media must become comfortable with the economics of fragmentation, not scale, according to Troy Mastin, media analyst for William Blair & Co. “We will see hyper-local products, targeted at specific suburban populations. Young people will associate based on personal interest, passion and professional affiliation.” Mastin was very bullish on community newspapers, particularly those smart enough to be open to consumer generated content, as “the cross-roads for rural areas.”

and…

Evolution from top-down to open dialogue model—Steve Grove, political director of YouTube, said, “The Hillary Clinton campaign was very much top down communications, with controlled messages. The Obama campaign moved toward a next generation approach of innovation driven by the crowd, such as the Change video produced by Will.i.am.” He noted that 50 million people have watched the 1,100 videos up on the Obama YouTube channel, compared to 4 million who have watched the 200 videos on the McCain YouTube channel. The Fight the Smears site put up by Obama’s campaign to combat rumors about the candidate “shows that you must combat falsehoods aggressively and quickly,” Grove said.