Will Mainstream Media Co-opt Blogs and the Internet? Traditional media companies are also watching the rise of blogging with an interested but anxious eye – much as they did the emergence of the Internet a decade ago, noted Hubert Burda [Publisher and CEO, Hubert Burda Media]. While many analysts doubt a profitable business model will ever be found for blogging, Burda disagreed. Most of the media trends predicted at events like the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum have proven to be wrong, he argued. “It’s like art – you can’t predict it. But if the audience is there, a business model will emerge. I’m sure of it.”
Worries that blogs might undermine the news gathering and filtering role of the mainstream media also are probably overblown, [Jay Rosen, Chair, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, New York University] argued. By converting news consumers into producers, bloggers are simply reinventing the communication techniques of an earlier era, when a learned elite exchanged knowledge and opinion via private correspondence. Technology makes it possible to extend the same methods to a broad audience. “The age of the mass media is just that – an age,” Rosen said. “It doesn’t have to last forever.”
Clearing the Data Smog: The information explosion means a major paradigm shift in the way human beings receive and apply knowledge. For example, much of the information circulating on the Internet now is recycled from other sources, noted moderator Theodore Zeldin, President, The Oxford Muse, United Kingdom. Roughly 95% of scientific research is never used. “I would argue,” said Zeldin, “that our universities are manufacturers of ‘waste information.’” [...]
Journalists, who have been trained as information providers, [Rosen] observed, are now becoming filters, essentially editors. Although many journalists seem concerned that mass media may disappear, Rosen sees the change elsewhere. “I don’t think mass media will disappear,” he said. “The way people communicate will change. What is under threat is the way we see people as masses.”
Journalists still want to hang on to the idea of giving the public what they think it needs to know, Rosen continued, “but the problem is: how do you know what that is?” With so much choice and interactivity, the decision process is passing to the audience. An example of the change is the sudden explosion of bloggers on the Net. Success or failure of a blog is really determined by how many people on the Net decide to link to a specific blog, or to ignore another. Rosen noted that the most successful bloggers build trust with their readers, but at the same time the readers are drawn back to the sites by the unpredictability of the content.
Nothing can force someone on the Net to read something that isn’t interesting, and the competition is fierce.
We're News, They're Propaganda: Ethan Zuckerman [Founder and CEO, Geekcorps], described the important role Web log authors, or “bloggers,” can play in providing news from places that the mainstream media fails to cover. The media is biased in what it does and does not cover, Zuckerman said, and its stress on infotainment often neglects important, but un-sexy, stories. [...]
News organizations are also biased towards competition, [Ibrahim Helal, Editor-in-Chief, Al Jazeera Satellite Channel] said. They tend to race for the same stories for fear of losing out to their rivals. “Competition is sometimes driving us to nowhere,” he said.
Mel Young [President, International Network of Street Papers], lamented the tendency for journalists to interview other journalists as “experts”. The increasing concentration of ownership in the media is eliminating objectivity, he said. Laziness and shrinking budgets make it more acceptable to interview a colleague than to seek out genuine opinions or analysis.
