Is media all about being social these days? Or is there still a need for mainstream, traditional media? Depends who you ask.

I was reading a very interesting post from PR-Squared, a blog written by Todd Defren of SHIFT Communications. In his post, Defren quoted Tim Dyson, the mastermind behind the NextFifteen group, who said:

“Only 20 years ago, the idea of seeing a news article and forwarding it to 100 people was at best a time consuming and expensive exercise. Today, anyone with Internet access can do it … Today an article is as good as the number of people that read it and then forward it, PLUS the number of people who then find it later when doing a search on Google, PLUS the number of people who find it because someone blogged about it, PLUS the number of people that found it because it was tweeted about (etc.).”

It definitely starts to put things into perspective. BUT, here are some statistics proving that newspapers aren’t necessarily on their way out — just changing. (from Tom Rosenstiel, Director, Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism)

• The number of unique visitors to newspaper Web sites grew by 15.8% to 65 million in the past year.
• Last year, the traffic to the top 50 news Web sites grew by 27%.
• One study, by Scarborough, suggests audience gains of 8.4% from online readership.

And as Defren points out – “Our culture rightfully continues to place more faith in storied institutions like the NY TIMES, BusinessWeek, FORTUNE, etc., than in the blogosphere’s pundits.”

So, do you prefer flipping or clicking? Traditional or social? The debate continues.