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So guess who’s a columnist for Women’s Post?

Yep. Me. How rad is that?

It’s a bi-monthly column called “Bridging the Gap” and its aim is to discuss the interactions between Old Media vs. New Media.

I’m pretty pumped because I get to use this forum to analyze and geek out about all the different moves played by traditional media outlets like TV, magazines and newspapers to try to make themselves more relevant via the rapidly changing medium of the Net. On the flipside, I also get to talk about New Media and how its users have been working to legitimize themselves and build business models around the content they’re creating on the web.

My first column really sums it all up:

The Internet has been a catalyst for change for a lot of different industries, but particularly within the world of traditional media, like newspapers, magazines and television.

Over the last six years, I’ve worked various media roles, from a chase producer for Canadian network programs to launching five online TV shows. Coming from a background of both traditional and “new media,” which essentially means online publications and web shows, I have had the benefit of seeing how both worlds have been growing and adapting to each other to accommodate this paradigm shift in how media is being consumed by the general public.

With regards to video consumption, for example, ComScore’s latest Video Metrix data report released April 2009 ranked Canada as the highest in online video viewing - beating countries like the UK, Germany, France, and the U.S. - and reported that the average Canadian online viewer spent 10 hours viewing online content, up 53 percent from last year.

The Internet really is the Wild West for mass media and in this column I’ll be taking a look at how the web has affected traditional mediums and point towards concrete examples of stories like networks launching webisodes to complement their TV shows or original web-only series; citizen journalism or viewer-created content becoming more sought out by news organizations; and newspapers and networks embracing the two-way conversation the Internet has become notorious for.

I’ll even be bringing to light examples of how web start-ups have made the leap into traditional mediums, with online magazines expanding into print or web series being sold to networks and launched as TV shows.

It seems the medium is no longer the message. Not entirely, at least. Content is king. And hopefully this column will help make sense of it all and offer a forum to explore, discuss and bridge the gap between Old Media and New Media.