Quote:
Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
In a world where people report, in detail, on events affecting them as they happen on blogs and even twitter, professional news services are going to find themselves under increasing strain.
The assumption that it's all low quality is amusing, but...
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In fact, most of those people are reporting what they see. But how many of them are doing the appropriate research and background checks? How many of them are reporting rumors and lies, because they don't check sources?
Quite a few do
zero research. Quite a few simply lift their info from other sources, the ones who did the real work. Quite a few depend on the word of anonymous strangers with personal agendas and unverifiable credentials, hiding behind convenient web names like... oh... "Shaggy"... for their reports.
In fact, the amusing part is how many people take the word of so many unprofessional, unverifiable, anonymous sources as gospel.
Personal reports and anecdotes will tell you that Frank, down the street, almost hit a telephone pole in his Prius. (And since a 12-year-old said it in his Twitter account, it must be true.) If you really want to search the web for a few months, you'll probably unearth a few-score similar reports. Personal reports and anecdotes
aren't going to tell you how many Toyotas have been the subject of a massive recall, nor when the last similar recall was, from which dealer, whether there was attributable loss of life, or whether there may have been actions and decisions in Toyota's past that prompted this problem.
You get that from quality journalism.
Sure, there are plenty of people out there who are happy to get their news from the 12-year-old through Twitter. For people who want real, detailed, verifiable news, they will go to quality journalists. And if they need that information in order to do their jobs, to get ahead, etc, they'll understand the value of paying for it if necessary.
Sure, professional journalism will be impacted, but it doesn't mean they will all collapse. It means renewed efforts to justify their existence, reconsolidation of services, and probably a few new tricks to entice a few more people. They will get lean and smart, because they'll need to, to survive.