Unless you have been sequestered from all sources of news during the past year, you know that America’s newspapers are in trouble. The New York Times was recently given a hand up by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helu but everyone agrees its future is in doubt.
Tribune Co. is in bankruptcy, Sun-Times Media Group is going under, and Knight-Ridder has already sold its holdings.
It won’t be long before America’s daily newspapers will be liquidated. How will this affect how we get our news? How will we hold governments and corporations to account? TV and radio will of course survive but they are devolving into entertainment sound bites to allow for more advertising space. Bloggers are doing their part but they will not likely gain the credibility or expertise that newspaper and other media have enjoyed.
I suspect that those ‘newspapers’ that do survive will find new life on Web pages, RSS feeds, e-mails delivering customized news and advertising, and on mobile phones. But, they are already spending less on journalism and trying to reach a future, younger demographic by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics. This is more of a testament to their desire to survive than to their commitment to reporting hard news which used to be why people would pick up a newspaper. A sign of the changing times, you might say.
This business of surviving our economic times is pressing many papers large and small to sack some of their most talented, experienced and higher-paid journalists. Will they find a forum in cyberspace? Probably. New tools that are convenient for the new century’s news consumers, such as iPods, cell phones, etc will most likely get their news from web-based services and this is where journalists will find a new outlet for their talents.
But local newspaper journalism is more likely to survive because people want community news such as events from the city council meeting. Just as likely though, major newspapers could tailor their news reporting to social-networking sites, for college students, mothers, and other groups.
The bottom line is that the closed world of professional editors and journalists has opened up. While bloggers can be subject to bias and slander, as a group, bloggers offer truth and transparency that cannot be imparted by newspapers obligated to deadlines or to those who pay them. People don’t want crap journalism and any blogger or professional journalist, for that matter, who partakes in passing it off as real will soon be left without a following.
News will always find a way reach those who want it. How we choose to get it will depend on our tolerance for having to wade through advertising, entertaining presentations and BS.
No comments:
Post a Comment