Lance Armstrong Dis-Intermediating Journalists?

The idea of using your own printing press--weblog, twitter, etc--to communicate, and not allowing reporters to deliver your "message" is something Dave Winer writes about a lot.

Lance Armstrong, who stopped talking to the news media without explanation or comment nearly two weeks ago, is not the first star athlete to tire of answering questions from reporters, but he does seem to be the first to embark on a drive to put them out of business entirely, by simply reporting, in multimedia blog posts and tweets, on his own exploits.

As my colleague Juliet Macur reported earlier this week, Philippe Maertens, a spokesman for Mr. Armstrong’s cycling team, “said that Armstrong was at first upset with reports that he had been the instigator of a rider protest last week in Milan. Now, Maertens said, he was not sure why Armstrong continued his boycott of the news media.” According to the spokesman, the seven-time Tour de France champion told him simply, “I don’t need them.”