2009/3/18 John O'Donovan <[email protected]>: > A blog reader does not replace all the things people buy a newspaper for in > my criteria. If it did, Newspapers would be dead already,
This strikes me as fallicious. Just because it hasn't collapsed yet doesn't mean that it won't peter out. McLuhan said early on that a new medium doesn't replace all the things the old medium has, but it has new things which the old medium doesn't, that make it preferable. Reading through a blog-reader and through a printed newspaper are as good an example of this as any. > but there is more > to it than this. If anything, reach and growth of newspapers on the internet > is growing That's because newspaper websites are becoming blogs, such as the replacement of subscription paywalls with public full-texts and ads, and no longer detering deeplinks in their URLs. > News International spent £650M on new presses last year... > ...clearly they are idiots. If only someone had told them about the > internet. NI is totally subsidised by its parent. How many other news corporations have made similar purchases? To hazard a guess, NI's nearest competitor, DMGT, makes £15 million a year. I expect they'll be able to save their pennies sooner than get a loan. > It is obviously a time of great change for Journalism. By newsroom > colleagues I didn't mean to imply just the BBC, I meant friends and contacts > in newsrooms across the globe who all have interesting stories to tell and > face various challenges. The BBC is funded differently to many of these, but > I can assure you UK, US and other newspapers all have plans. They are not > packing up all the desks and switching off the lights; they are looking at > how they adapt and stay relevant. But they have not found what they are looking for. > You did actually predict gleefully the demise of the middleman, the > aggregator, the editor, whatever you like to think of the Newspaper > infrastructure as, and I think this is something that is not certain. If you > don't want this then no one will force you to have it, but others do want > it. > > I would say the recession is having a more acute effect than the internet. > Without ad revenues, there are funding issues. If the money isn't there to support it, it will stop, even if people "want" it to continue. The recession is an acute effect, the internet is a chronic effect; the net causes the money to not be there because ad revenues are being redirected from professional media to unprofessional media, following the redirection of mass attention from professional content to amateur content. In short: Google wins, because they don't have to pay people to make the stuff they sell ads off. Perhaps a couple of newspapers will continue as 'vanity press' but those are not exactly known for quality unbiased journalism. > Striving for independence is not new to this field either. There is a long > tradition of independent journalists, freelance reporters and photographers > and it's nothing new that people have been trying independent models: Working as a big corporate news contractor isn't really different to being an employee, because as the corporations go bust, they'll be doing just the same amount of journalism: None. > In a more direct move to deliver to the audience, an independent group such > as the workers cooperative behind City Limits might be another interesting > model of relevance, and it was not the internet that brought about it's > existence or demise ( > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Limits_(London_magazine). "a more direct move to deliver to the audience" sounds awful like "learn up about internet marketing" to me. And isn't MediaLens a contemporary for City Limits? > Of course with these models there is still organisation and infrastructure. > Someone pays the bills. Someone is exerting editorial control. If you want a > (quality) picture of an event, someone has to be there and some poor > pictures from a phone camera are not a replacement. This type of content is > used where relevant. Phone camera quality is getting better faster and more widely distributed year on year. How many years until it is a replacement, and the script is flipped so professional photos are "used where relevant"? > If you feel that the Journalistic community is full of people trying to > subvert the truth, espousing mis-information, I dread the day that a billion > unaccountable blogs replace them. I'd pay for something in between and that > might likely be the Newspapers in a different form. I don't think I will be > alone. Why do you think that the journalist profession is NOT full of people trying to subvert the truth and espouse mis-information? I think that blogs can be as accountable as newspapers, if not more so. > "For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits > of the old, high-profit regime--intensive reporting, experienced editors, > and so on--and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can't last. > Soon enough, we're going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find > out just how little that is." Soon enough, quite so. "political reporters no longer get to decide what's news. The days when a minister gave briefings to a dozen lobby correspondents, and thereby dictated the next day's headlines, are over. Now, a thousand bloggers decide for themselves what is interesting." http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/Daniel_Hannan/blog/2009/03/25/my_speech_to_gordon_brown_goes_viral - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. 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