UGC: The death of the newspaper or the start of democratic journalism?
Two-thirds the number of newspaper readers now read blogs. Does this pose a threat to the future of Journalism? Well, only for advertisers and marketing dinosaurs who can’t adapt to the changing face of the media.
All this talk of the death of the newspaper reminds me of when the record industry went all Chicken Little, screaming the sky was falling in a thunder-storm of free music all over their profits. Napster and Kazaa (now replaced by Bittorrent) were letting people get music for free-a problem for sure. But what did the record industry do? Sweet F.A. They wasted all their time suing people and crying over ever-decreasing album sales. This made room for ITunes. Apple saw oppurtunity in the change instead of doom and well, the rest is a fruity piece of history.
A similar thing is happening to Journalism, except it’s not illegal to download free news (yet). Blogs and online news are filling the role that newspaper no longer can… providing instant news and opinion. Basically, the role of newspapers has changed to one of analysis, rather than breaking the story.
‘Citizen Journalism‘ though, is an entirely new thing. There are two-types of CJ’s -the eyewitness with a camera or mobile who gets that one-in-a-million shot of something huge, and the professional, one-man newsroom.
Check this out: Steve Garfield from The Uptake (a video-journalist website) beats CNN to a scoop about 2008 Presidential candidate, Duncan Hunter and explains how he streams news live from his mobile phone…
Steve Garfield – Citizen Journalist, beats CNN to their scoop
and just for fun:
August 17th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I loved your choice of a metaphor for the whinging music industry.
Great post, great resources and great out of the box thinking.