A summer ritual of the technology and media press is breathless coverage of the Allen & Co conference that's held every year in the chic resort town of Sun Valley, Idaho. Allen & Co is an investment bank that specializes in media deals, and Herb Allen, who has a place in Sun Valley, has succeeded in creating a mogul shmooze-fest that often results in deals (the goal of any investment bank). Reporters are not actually invited, but a couple of dozen show up anyway and try to work their sources and construct a storyline around the body language and recreational partnerships of the information industry elite.

Since the late 1990s, a key piece of that storyline has been the increasing presence and influence of technology execs in what had been the preserve of movie and TV people. Studio chiefs and network executives are out; software and internet moguls are in. This year it was Chad Hurley, co-founder of the video-sharing site YouTube, who played the role of Symbol of Change. It took five years for the Google guys to get invited to Sun Valley, noted more than one press account, yet Hurley was there barely a year after his company was launched! This world is moving so fast!

Yet to me the prominent presence of internet entrepreneurs in Sun Valley is not a sign of a shifting power structure, but rather just the opposite. The internet is fundamentally changing the way people listen to music and watch television and get their news, it's altering the very fabric of social interaction, it's undermining a century of media habits and the marketing, distribution and creative infrastructures that served them. Yet Allen & Co, a white-shoe firm whose hushed, wood-paneled headquarters are in the Coca-Cola building on Fifth Avenue in New York, is still able to set the agenda.

Indeed, one report from this year's conference, by The New York Times’s mergers and acquisitions writer, Andrew Ross Sorkin, declared that the real stars this year were not even the celebrity moguls but rather the hedge fund managers who increasingly control Wall Street's biggest pools of investible capital. Media stocks are in the doldrums due to the aforementioned changes and the hedge funds, well, maybe they could help out with that. Wall Street financiers throwing their weight around – nothing very "Web 2.0" about that.

YouTube has had about as good a start as any internet company ever, based on a very simple proposition: easy-to-use video sharing. Yet it turns out that the most popular "shared" video on the site is not that which people create on their video cameras, but rather what they copy off the TV. And so there is Hurley in Sun Valley, trying to cut deals with old-line media companies so that he can a) generate revenue off his wildly successful site and b) avoid being sued into oblivion (remember Napster?). YouTube, like MySpace, threatens to become an old-media marketing vehicle before it's even become a real business.

I read the other day that Yahoo! was in talks with the big newspaper companies about how they could work together in a deep and comprehensive way. I certainly see the logic there, and Terry Semel, Yahoo!’s chief executive is, after all, an old-media thoroughbred (and a Sun Valley regular). As a new-media entrepreneur with a dog in this fight, though, I find this development a bit disappointing – new media looking and acting more like old media, rather than the other way around.

One of the great contradictions of American business culture is that, in theory, it idolises the entrepreneur, the creative person who breaks the mould, takes risk, and invents something new. It doesn’t punish failure in the way that other business cultures do. Ultimately, though, the celebrity entrepreneurs are not necessarily those who carve a new path – it is those who are successful enough to get invited to Establishment parties, like the one in Sun Valley.

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a new type of regional news and information service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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