So I’m going to make a historical analogy. Recall what the early days of newspaper journalism were like? Gutenberg’s printing press was a relatively new contraption. Newspapers were sprouting up like sugarcane in Hawaii. The country was in a media boom… a print media boom, that is.

Why is today like the Gilded Age once again? We’re beginning to see the maturation of online media. In the late 1880s, the heated battle between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal was at its apogee. The battle is best depicted in Citizen Kane. How does this compare with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace and Google’s buy of YouTube? Quite well. And it could forebode the future of these young, immature media.

Print media, back then, was more “yellow” than “yellow” will ever be again in history - and thank God for that. The haphazard speed at which things happened in the Gilded Age encouraged bombast, inaccuracy, and sheer irresponsible journalism. It was the PT Barnum of reportage - always out for the sucker.

Online media, today? Much like print journalism in its yellow, gonzo era. But we’re coming out - and I’m not the only one to think this. Forbes had a report today posing the somewhat-rhetorical question: Is Content King Once More?

So is content really king now? Haven’t we been saying that for years of web media - and yet, each day is another video of a drunk David Hasselhoff, or a college girl taking a bath in macaroni and cheese. Each day provides yet more evidence that our culture doesn’t care about carefully constructed content any longer, and all they look for is a quick and dirty diversion?

Of course, these questions, too, may remain rhetorical for some time. And Forbes is merely posing the question as one of the few old media conglomerates that has managed to succeed online.