Last week, rumours were flying around the stock market and the web about a proposed £4bn takeover of Emap by the web navigation giant Yahoo!, which pushed Emap's share prices up by more than a third.
Both parties refused to comment on the uber-bid but privately dismissed the rumours as "unfounded". End of story - potentially the biggest convergence story since the announcement of the AOL/Time Warner merger in January.
It would not have been the first time Yahoo! had flirted with conventional media (it has been linked with Dorling Kindersley, the educational publishers, and Murdoch's News Corp among others), but it is no coincidence that the rumour followed in the wake of the Nasdaq catastrophe, which saw the market for hi-tech stocks lose a quarter of its value in five days. It made perfect sense that Yahoo! would want to consolidate its position by buying into a publishing powerhouse, especially when shares were cheap.
The great wobble in the new economy has been a wake-up call for big internet brands such as Yahoo!, Excite and Freeserve. In the US, internet companies across the spectrum, from AOL to Salon.com and ebay.com, have started getting into bed with old media or diverging into traditional media forms. One by one, the webbies are coming back onto dry land.
Rebecca Ulph, new media analyst at Fletcher Research, sees two possible reasons for the flow back into old media. "It's certainly a way new media companies can convert share prices into real value, and with exclusive content they can improve their offering and differentiate themselves from the others. There is a certain amount of honesty attached to old media brands compared to new media, which can appear to be fly-by-night and unsubstantiated."
The announcement last week by Hollinger, the group behind the Telegraph, that it was open to the idea of a merger with a major internet company was well timed. It was surely influenced by the crash. "The last five weeks have been a resounding wake-up call to a lot of people," says Daniel Colson, vice-chairman of Hollinger. "The AOL/Time Warner deal was the benchmark really. People realised that while the internet is here to stay, there is still a need to identify businesses that have fundamental revenue streams."
Yahoo! refuses to comment on any rumours relating to the Telegraph or Emap - or indeed on any of its future plans. The world's number one portal with 35m visitors a month has always maintained that it is keen to develop its own content rather than merge with a media company. Its European rival Excite, on the other hand, is cautious of trying to become a mass media brand in its own right.
"To develop content in-house is a huge effort," says Ronnie Planalp, senior director of business development at Excite. "Do people associate Yahoo! with a sports magazine or lifestyle magazine? No. But the pre-eminent brands of Time Warner, for example, are worth something. The message to glean from the Yahoo!/Emap rumour is that new media companies need content to go down their pipes." Excite currently has around 70m users. The dilemma it faces now is the same one that publishers have had for years: how to keep them?
ISPs face a deeper identity crisis still. With unmetered or unlimited free access to the internet just around the corner, the wires or pipes which provide the service will become increasingly invisible. Many are already feeling the pressure to come offline.
"ISPs and portals are facing a huge dilemma," says Matt Peacock, head of corporate communications for AOL Europe, which incorporates Compuserve, AOL UK and Netscape Online. "They are having to start asking 'what are we here for?' The smart players realise that the days of providing raw internet access are going - access is becoming irrelevant. Consumers are increasingly concerned with look and feel, the content and the features on their sites. The next growth phase is when all the providers start thinking, 'how are we going to keep all our subscribers?'"
This, he confirms, was the "key driver" for the merger with Time Warner. It was a logical progression for AOL. The investment in 450 individual content providers has also paid off. According to Mediamatrix, AOL users stay an average of 30 minutes per visit on the site, while for other ISPs the average is 3.2 minutes - enough time to pick up email and leave.
In the past week, Freeserve, the UK's biggest internet portal and service provider, has also been linked with Emap (the Times reported that Emap rebuffed Freeserve's offer) and the publishers of Loot in content/acquisition deals. A spokesperson for Freeserve said they would not comment on the speculation in the press.
But Freeserve has been aware of the shift towards content for a while and created an in-house editorial team with a staff of 150 and new offices in Clerkenwell, central London.
Identity crises aside, the flow back into traditional meat 'n' two veg media is in many ways a natural process of evolution for many internet brands which are now mature enough to compete in the non-virtual world.
In America, cult websites such as Salon.com (3.4m unique users) and The Onion.com (500,000 visitors a week) have been syndicating their content to TV and print for some time. The Onion has a newspaper with a readership of 400,000; Salon has several book deals pending and its columnists are reproduced in newspapers. Its latest deal with Endeavour, a Hollywood talent agency, and a deal with Bravo, a subsidiary of Cablevision, will leverage Salon's content onto mainstream TV. Andrew Ross, the executive VP, claims, "We never really left old media. [Moving into TV] is a natural for us. The content is primary, the platform is secondary."
The recent US launch of sexy literary website Nerve.com's own glossy magazine created waves in the business press because of the way it was self-consciously "reverse-engineered" by the chief executive, Rufus Griscom.
Griscom told Sunday Business that it had used the internet "for finding readers and getting subscriptions" for the 50,000 print-run glossy.
"What people are realising is there is no such thing as a company that cannot benefit from the efficiencies offered by the internet," he said.
What the Time Warner/AOL taught us is that the old/new media convergence works just as well both ways. Only a year ago, it seemed new media needed old media like a fish needs a bicycle - now both are becoming increasingly amphibious.
