Is printed news a dead medium? How can traditional media sources evolve?
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M$3 Answers
This is because the news in print is always at least 12 hours old and folks have access to the same news the day before on their phones and computers.
With the Kindle getting cheaper ad better over the coming years, and having built in 3g, even the folks commuting will stop reading the paper in favor of their netbook/tablet/ereader type device.
Now, will the news business go away? No way. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are NOT going away. They will continue to do high-end journalism, but they will get 99% of their readers online as opposed to in print.
This means that the print news cycle will end and the formatting of stories will change. You will no longer need to have a certain length and write the story once. You'll cover the story in "chunks" and users will follow the chunks.
Blogging is chunks of journalism in my mind. Chunky journalism is more efficient because the story can unfold in real time.
You've already seen traditional media companies roll out blogs, and you're seeing bloggers become more professional. This says to me that a new journalism is forming... one that is faster, lighter and more interactive.
There is the medium and there is the message.
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M$
Suggestion... if it is possible, write a script to query the other answers to see if there is a similar question already posed. Then add the link to the current question to the other "related" questions.
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M$The entire idea that we NEED newspapers at all - to open up foreign bureaus, to train cub reporters, to associate a certain standard of quality and accuracy with a trusted brand name - just aren't going to be as important in the future. We will always need journalists and journalism, but who says they have to work for the New York Times?
Blogs demonstrate that it's economically feasible for an individual or small group of individuals to make a living off of disseminating news and opinion without the aid of a publishing empire. What they can't do is make ENOUGH money to make it viable for them to report news from all over the world. I'm confident that this will change over time, as more and more people adopt these new technologies, and get more used to reading their information from an online resource rather than the Washington Post.
Right now, if I want to start a career journalism, I either have to intern at a big paper or move to the middle of nowhere and write for a small paper. That's how I'd figure out what I was doing and get my on-the-job training. But in the future, if journalism is decentralized and anyone can start their own online news resource, instead of covering city council meetings in small towns (which can easily be done by locals on blogs), I'd move to Sri Lanka and cover the situation there, freelance.
Besides, having a big newspaper in every city is just redundant. Why do people in Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, Iowa City, Orlando, Mobile, Arlington and Eugene all have to see the same movie and write reviews on the same day? Most of these papers could fold tomorrow and no one would have trouble hearing about the news.
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M$
But this assumes that bloggers will remain amateurs while professionals work exclusively for magazines and newspapers. I'm not sure why so many people have this assumption. We need professional reporters, but why couldn't these people just write for blogs...professionally? (In fact, many already do...Andrew Sullivan is a professional journalist whose primary function is writing a blog.)
We're locked into this mindset that the only way for a person to become reliable as a conduit for information is for them to get hired by the Boston Globe. It just doesn't make sense for me, and clearly, it doesn't make sense as a business model any more.
And you can find THOUSANDS of differing opinions about movies online. Why do you need to read about what a person in your town thinks of "Benjamin Button," if a very erudite person from two states over has already written a compelling review? We're not talking about centralizing news in the hands of a few elites. That's how it is now. Moving journalism online and away from papers decentralizes and democratizes it. Anyone can be a journalist so long as they go out and do good reporting.
We just have to figure out how to get these people paid.
Each city is different and I don't think one paper could cover the same subjects. While the city newspapers might reduce their world coverage (which is generally purchased and not supplied by their local reporters) the reporting on the local events will continue--either in print or on the web. As to movie reviews, I don't want to hear just one or two opinions. There needs to be 30 or 40 out there.
I disagree that professional journalism can be replaced by amateur blogs. There are times that we need someone who has a professional responsibility to cover events and not just access to the Internet.
