The Jason Salas Experience

John Branston of The Memphis Flyer makes a plea to support local newspapers, writing, "Opinions and blogs and summaries of other people's work may be interesting, but they’re not news." Somewhat true, but that's changing. If you define news as the act of (hopefully) objectively recalling an event, or composing a thought and defending an argument for public rebuttal, many bloggers don't fit the mold. But they don't have to - and that's the beauty of new media applications on communication. It's a new take on an old set of rules in need of revision.

John's is a well-written piece, but doesn't consider some of the more in-place technologies propagating information, and appears desperate in its support of an inferior platform that realistically hasn't got that many years left in its current incarnation. This leads me to herein update a previous column I wrote just eight months ago - as a member of the mainstream news media - in which I predicted the newspaper industry's inevitable death due to the increase in popularity of new media services. (The same certainly applies for today's broadcast industry, as well.) This is a theory passionately shared by participatory journalism advocates, and by a growing number of mainstream media types the world over.

In the web-enabled Age of Information, free's the word - free content, free tools for creation and access, free choice, free archival, free retrieval, free opt-in, free opt-out, free customization, free personalization. The newspaper's traditional subscription-based revenue model doesn't keep up, and banner ads can't significantly support a full transition to web-based publishing. The fact that a paper can't diversify by adding rich multimedia to its site, lest people gravitate towards such material and cannibalize the paper's core competency also stifles the platform. Print additionally lacks the immediacy and time-shifted accessibility benefits of blogging and podcasting. A newspaper also can't be customized, unable to tailor itself to the needs, tastes and preferences of the individual.

So they're stuck.

Branston also proposes that "the printed newspaper is morally superior to the computer." Here's a reality check: most people are willing to sacrifice morals if doing so saves them some money. Likewise, being well-principled ultimately takes a back seat to choice, timeliness and speed/frequency of delivery. So let's consider the real argument people have about new media: quality.

Reporting excellence realistically isn't really much of a factor anymore...no longer is "the media" seen as an exclusive club that puts us in the business in some elite class above the average citizen, privvy to control the flow of information, the world's most valuable commodity. I know hobbyist bloggers who can run rings around professional reporters in terms of being able to ask the right questions, being well-connected, maintaining a captive audience, properly using humor, telling a compelling story and writing effectively. Sounds a lot like grassroots journalism, doesn't it?

Credibility, on the other hand, is still largely measured by one's association to a respected organization, so that's a hurdle we've yet to truly overcome. Accuracy wavers, with a third-party editorial function absent from most blogs.

To further compare new media services to print, consider research indicating that the age of newspaper readers is getting older, implying a preference shift to Internet-based delivery mechanisms. Steve Rubel also discovered that many people don't really care about a blogger's literary acumen and consiciously don't expect blogs to be traditional masterful publications, just expecting interesting thoughts.

John very wisely notes that today's newspaper beats out the Internet in privacy, but leaves out the critical interactivity aspect that so sorely hurts papers (another element print media hasn't widely been able to effectively leverage). True, a paper doesn't track and submit demographic data about you in the background and is a mobile product in the truest sense of the word, but in what capacity can you interact with the editorial staff? Today's world is about sharing information, not hording it.

The big knock on blogs used to be that the classical promotional engine of big-budget corporations would trump any viral marketing effort by the cyberspace community. Not so - the hype generated by shareware/freeware, web promotion, word-of-mouth advertising and community push has proven to be self-sustaining, and for some applications has exclusively driven their popularity. Look what's become of WikiPedia.

People have also said blogs wouldn't get off the ground because they'd be too hard to find amidst the millions of domains and web pages. Good point - recent analysis indicates the size of the blogosphere reportedly doubles every five months. Blog trackers now deliver near real-time content at no cost; old school wire services used to provide such services at a price so premium only formal news services could afford them. RSS is everywhere these days, to the point of sites without them being labeled inferior.

Advanced services categorizing, filtering and distributing content according to popularity in the blogosphere like Technorati, Memeorandum, Blogniscient and Digg aren't just improving the quality of experience for existing consumers by eliminating the tedious search function...they're bringing more people in by simplifying the process. And these services weren't even publicly available when I penned my column above this past February, exhibiting the rapid product development cycle of new media apps. Blog search tools like those of Google and Yahoo! make finding content even easier, social networking services like del.icio.us make one's content of interest accessible (Flickr adds a multimedia twist), and RSS aggregators like Google Reader ensure you get just what you want without having to sift through nonsense and clutter. Litefeeds even makes it mobile.

Google News tracks only legitimate news agencies, sources, stations and publications and updates its index every few minutes, delivering a rapid response surpassing anything a paper or broadcast could ever hope to achieve, the latter media being limited by rigid distribution schedules.

I'm not saying we need to rub all MSM journalists out of the picture - there's always going to be a need and place in society for trained writers, reporters and columnists. It's not the profession, it's the platform. We need to embrace the concept of citizen reporting and include their contributions into the equation, too. An example of such integration is the undoubtable fact that the classification of people I respectfully call "groupie bloggers" (those whose blogging behavior typically recycles interesting content from other sites, perhaps the same community John refers to) will link to mainstream origins anyway, resulting in the circulation of their information.

The bottom line is that the system works. New media apps beat the static, non-interactive, dated nature of newspapers. And whether you agree with it or not, to ignore such products and services is asking to get wiped out by them.

(And in fairness, as Steve also mentioned, broadcast media outlets are subject to the same doom as print, just not as immediate. Radio's current state, in terms of content delivery, revenue model and accessibility is horrendous; and traditional TV is already starting to head down the same path.)