The fashion industry recently got a bit of a shakeup when bloggers crashed the front row of several shows in Europe.
Perhaps it is the insular nature of the industry and its writers, but the surprised reaction by established fashion writers to the bloggers is hard to understand.
After all, the industry prides itself as being at the forefront of persuading people what to wear and what not to be seen in.
But not everyone thought it was adorable in September when a 13-year-old blogger named Tavi was given a front-row seat at the fashion shows of Marc Jacobs, Rodarte and others, NYTimes.com reported.
Within a matter of months, Tavi Gevinson, the author of a blog called Style Rookie, was feted by designers, filming promotions for Target, flown to Tokyo for a party with the label Comme des Garcons and writing a review of the collections for no less than Harper's Bazaar.
Kate and Laura Mulleavy, the designers of Rodarte, described her in the pages of Teen Vogue as "curious and discerning".
It seems it was what the arrival of Tavi Gevinson, as a blogger, represented that ruffled feathers among the fashion elite.
NYTimes.com writer Eric Wilson wrote that Anne Slowey, who had spent decades climbing the editorial ladder to a senior position at Elle, dismissed the teenager's column as "a bit gimmicky" in an interview with New York magazine.
In an instant, the subtext in her complaint was read by dozens of Tavi Gevinson's fans as an example of the tension between old media and new.
Kelly Cutrone, who has been organising fashion shows since 1987, said there had been a complete change in media coverage.
"Do I think, as a publicist, that I now have to have my eye on some kid who's writing a blog in Oklahoma as much as I do on an editor from Vogue?
"Absolutely. Because once they write something on the internet, it's never coming down.
"And it's the first thing a designer is going to see."
It was inevitable the communication revolution would affect the make-up of the fashion news media in much the same way it had changed the broader news media landscape.
Mr Wilson wrote, at a time when magazines like Vogue, W, Glamour and Bazaar had pared their staff numbers and undergone deep cutbacks because of the effect of the recession on their advertising sales, blogs had made remarkable strides in gaining both readership and higher profiles.
At the shows last year, there were more seats reserved for editors from online publications and fewer for reporters from regional newspapers that could no longer afford the expense of covering the runways independently.
It is not without reason some editors feel threatened, or seasoned critics worry they could be replaced by a teenager.
The designers and publicists who once quivered before the mighty pens are now courting writers from websites that offer a direct pipeline to customers.
There is some unease in the United States, at least, that online writers might be unduly influenced by designers or beauty companies.
New guidelines from the US Federal Trade Commission require blogs to disclose in their online product reviews if they receive free merchandise or payment for the items they write about.
That bothers some bloggers, since magazine editors commonly receive stockpiles of the same expensive products to review in their pages, and that practice is rarely disclosed even though magazines are beholden to advertisers for their livelihood.
In New Zealand, bloggers continually push the legal boundaries on name suppression orders.
Traditional media outlets, while rushing to post the latest updates on their online sites, are battling with the legal niceties around all sorts of issues.
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is battling on behalf of the industry to get search engines to pay for content generated by journalists he pays.
This year is set to be another big one for the media.
