Comment by EnderMB
17 years ago
This will be an unpopular opinion but I think that if anything blogging and social news will cool down whereas traditional media will just become more compact until both mediums compliment each other.
Traditional media won't sit back and watch their businesses succumb to bankruptcy. In its current state social media seems to be overly reliant on traditional media to first do the grunt work. Websites like Newsvine have attempted to create citizen journalism alongside its traditional counterpart and in some special circumstances it has worked, but for 99.999% of stories there's no difference between news and blogging. If traditional media ever feels threatened it will react against social media and without the references to stories that the traditional media brings both will lose out.
Until someone comes along and provides real news and journalism outside of the traditional media newspapers and news broadcasters will continue to make money. In the same way that people still want to listen to the radio when they have televisions I'll still want to read a newspaper on the bus or during my lunch break.
I'd love someone to poke some holes in my reasoning, but I cannot see any way for traditional media to lose out to the Internet.
I disagree. The problem with traditional media is that they define themselves as being exactly how they are today. And that doesn't leave a path for them to transform into what they could survive as tomorrow.
Big newspapers, for example, don't seem willing to succumb to the idea that regurgitating AP wire reports, the weather, national sports news, craigslist printouts, and Marmaduke strips need not be a part of their identity. All of those things are part of the glorious edifice of newspaperdom. And thus most newspapers will almost certainly hold on to that sense of identity until the bitter end, hoping that one of the many tiny little adjustments they keep making here and there will finally be their financial salvation.
Ultimately I think the vast majority of traditional media groups are just too wedded to their outdated identities to be able to shed their skin and become something utterly different.
Traditional media may still be doing a lot of the "grunt work" today in reporting, but that's already changing incredibly rapidly. And at the rate that independent reporters are sprouting up it may not be long until people stop peddling the line that blogs are just lazy consumers of the news that the traditional media creates (already that is not 100% true).
The thing that a lot of people don't realize is that a perfect replacement for the existent news media does not have to exist in order to "allow" traditional news media to fail. It is quite possible, and likely, that there will be a relative vacuum that will be filled in after the fact, not before.