Here’s an interesting post from “Graham” at Entrecard, a traffic service for bloggers. He suggests, tongue in cheek, that it’s the journalism industry that really needs a bailout. Here’s an excerpt:
I don’t have the solutions, but I know four things about the future of journalism, blogging, and newspapers:
- Print newspapers will die.
- People will still need accurate, accountable, factual reporting
- Blogging in its current form cannot replace newspapers
- Something new, some new form of blogging / citizens journalism, backed by healthy industry, will have to emerge.
It’s a bad time to be a journalist. I know that very well. But what a (relatively) great time to be a citizen journalist living in Minnesota. MinnPost is demonstrating success in generating top notch journalism for an all-online organization. Meantime, up north, the KAXE Community Internet Project (still in beta form) is about to name its new editor who will be charged with taking a network of community journalists and bloggers and turning it into a functional nonprofit community news site featuring diverse points of view and local content for small towns. Hometown Focus is still trying to do grassroots journalism for the Iron Range using a commercial model. The million dollar question for all of these projects remains: where’s the money? But that’s the same problem newspapers have without the crippling debt.
If I were a graduate student in journalism I’d park myself in the North Star State and explore how these various endeavors, along with the traditional small dailies like the Mesabi Daily News and Hibbing Daily Tribune (for which I write a column) turn out. The answer will be vitally important to the future of information in the Information Age.
I don’t think it’s a bad time to be a journalist. It’s a great time! The newspapers are simply not applying what they already know about their print business to make it work for them. For instance, STOP making people register to get in. START recruiting advertisers to the site, and use coupons on the site for LOCAL businesses to get the advertisers to see the impact the web version can have. And REWARD journalists who produce quality articles that people come to the site to read, such as the writings of Aaron Brown, whose blog gets plenty of traffic even without being part of the local “paper.”
Oh, and on the Iron Range, we truly need only one “local” paper to take care of all of us from Ely to Grand Rapids. Having all these different varieties of what is essentially the same thing in every market is pretty pointless.
I think the industry is so darned busy attempting to protect the print version, that it is ignoring the real possibilities of the electronic world. But then, these companies aren’t run by people in their 20s and 30s, are they?