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The Almighty Buck The Media The Internet

The Future of Journalism Online 53

twitter writes "The slide in newspaper subscriptions continues for obvious reasons: convenience, variety, depth, cost and user control are all in favor of pull media. The BBC is wondering what this will ultimately mean for journalism. One interesting issue is brought up: 'papers like France's Libération [have] traditionally shunned advertising it deemed politically compromising and relied on its cover price for its income.' Even they see that internet distribution is the answer, but the BBC worries about the details." From the article: "The International Herald Tribune now sees itself as a media organisation rather than just a paper; their website features video stories and has taken the step of charging for premium content. 'Good journalism costs money and so we are trying to see what we can do to make sure we can continue to grow and support the business,' said Meredith Artley, director of digital development at the International Herald Tribune. "
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The Future of Journalism Online

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  • by newscloud ( 1037538 ) on Sunday December 10, 2006 @05:44PM (#17187290) Homepage
    The traditional mainstream media is essentially a monolithic workflow stack for reporting information that depends on scale for advertising revenue. The Internet doesn't change the basic structure of the operation - or its incentives. In contrast, the future of journalism online is like to be distributed, more like honey from a beehive. In this spirit, we released our platform to the open source community [newscloud.com] this past week. There is much work to do. We're like a tenth of a nanosecond past the big bang of online journalism.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 10, 2006 @06:01PM (#17187402)
    I'd definitely subscribe to a newspaper...if it were possible for me to subscribe to one. I live approximately halfway between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. in a 300-unit apartment complex. I've tried to subscribe to both the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun, but neither offers delivery in my area. In one of the most connected areas of the country, I find it hard to believe that I can't pay someone to toss a newspaper tossed on my front stoop, but that's the truth.
  • by jlarocco ( 851450 ) on Sunday December 10, 2006 @06:17PM (#17187520) Homepage
    The on-line versions are going to have to compete in the 24x7 world, and actually improve their standards of reporting if they want to compete with the blogosphere.

    Maybe I'm only one, but I simply don't trust blogs as news sources. Even at their best, their "news" is rehashed from a real news source.

  • No. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jb.hl.com ( 782137 ) <joe.joe-baldwin@net> on Sunday December 10, 2006 @06:32PM (#17187596) Homepage Journal
    I could, easily, read my chosen paper [guardian.co.uk] online, but I choose not to. The typography is better and easier on my eyes. The viewing area is bigger, and can fit more information in it without having to scroll down (reading from paper feels far more natural than reading from a screen). It's more convenient (I can read a paper on my couch, in the canteen at work, in bed, on the can, just about anywhere really...). Papers aren't going to die any time soon.
  • by docinthemachine ( 1031976 ) on Sunday December 10, 2006 @06:40PM (#17187656) Homepage
    The progressive killing off of traditional print publishing by e-publishing is true and here to stay in all fields. Hre is a review of how strong this trend is in medical e-publishing where free open source e-text is replacing traditional medical journals. The same is happening for fiction. read more here at : http://docinthemachine.com/2006/12/05/is-paper-med ical-publishing-dead/ [docinthemachine.com]
  • by ghostbar38 ( 982287 ) on Sunday December 10, 2006 @06:48PM (#17187710) Homepage Journal

    More people use a notebook for reading news in anyplace or they cellphone and not those wear concepts of e-papers...

    That makes media focus in the internet market, just as Google does focusing in the mobile market[Spanish] [ghostbar.ath.cx]

  • by theLOUDroom ( 556455 ) on Sunday December 10, 2006 @10:52PM (#17189740)
    Nationally, the NY Times and other papers of similar weight remain bastions of actual reporting.

    As Huey Freeman would put it:
    Read Dummy! [wikipedia.org]

    The NYT might look great compared to Fox News, but they have been far from exemplary.
  • by tulsaoc3guy ( 755854 ) on Monday December 11, 2006 @12:32AM (#17190524)
    I would venture to say that the gossip tabloids, both British and American, have been largely unaffected by the Internet.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 11, 2006 @03:04PM (#17197974)
    The AP gets caught falsify sources and admits they have "talking points".
    Reuters gets caught photoshopping (cut-n-paste, clone tool, etc.) photos.
    It has been shown that most of the reporting about Katrina was false.

    Really why trust them?

    from: http://shrinkwrapped.blogs.com/blog/2005/11/revisi ting_less.html [blogs.com]
    posted Nov 15, 2005

    Lessons from Vietnam: The Credibility Gap

    The MSM* was permanently changed by the Vietnam war and its aftermath, including the Watergate scandal and the Nixon impeachment. [As commenter Jon Ravin points out in the interest of accuracy, Nixon was never actually impeached, but resigned when his impeachment became inevitable. This correction was made at the time of the original post-SW] The experiences of that time explain much of the agenda journalism of the MSM today, but I would submit that they have not only forgotten the most crucial lesson from Vietnam, but their failure to remember will ultimately destroy them as a uniquely important and powerful force in our society.

    First some history:

    During the years of the troop escalation in Vietnam, ultimately topping out at over 550,000 American military personal, the Pentagon and the White House, still fighting the last war in terms of Public Relations, continually measured our success in the war by pointing to "body counts". Using an outdated model of war in which the media play the role of conveyors of information controlled by the Pentagon and the administration, daily body counts of enemy combatants were touted as evidence, in the infamous words of General Westmoreland, that we could see "the light at the end of the tunnel." From 1965 on, we were, according to the daily body counts, winning the Vietnam war. When the Tet offensive took place in January of 1968, the reason the public was so shocked and ready to see our military victory as a defeat was that the expectations of victory "right around the corner" were crushed. We never knew that the North Vietnamese, post-Tet, were ready to sue for peace; all we knew was that an enemy who was supposedly being decimated was able to launch a major offensive. The conclusion was that either our military and the administration were incompetent, or that they had been lying to us all along. This lead to the "Credibility Gap". No longer would our press, feeling with some justification that they had been used and lied to, allow themselves to be so gullible. From this point on , the press almost universally saw themselves in an adversarial role against the military and the Executive branch of government.

    It is important to note that the Pentagon and White House were only doing what had always been done in war time. The purpose of news in war time is to support the morale of the home front and to that end, propaganda has always been an important aspect of warfare. Unfortunately for the Johnson and Nixon administrations, while the nature of war hadn't really changed, the nature of our media had. We had close to real time news emanating from the battlefields of Vietnam. Reporters could see that there were attacks not being reported, injuries and deaths of Americans being swept under the rug, and constant reports of impending victory which were easily refuted.

    This is extremely relevant to our war effort today. The military realizes that we are fighting a new kind of war, which includes a significant public relations aspect on the home front. [The military may have recognized this, but there has been precious little evidence that the Bush Administration has caught on to this aspect of the Information War.] The MSM does not yet recognize that fact; they are still fighting the last war.

    We are winning in Iraq and have been for some time. When the Iraqis vote on their Constitution, with significant voting from the Sunni areas, the MSM will not be able to disguise the fact. [Though they "buried the lead" and the story as quickly as pos

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