Literally thousands of journalists are employed around the world to bring current event coverage to readers of thousands of newspapers and their online sites. News syndicators such as AP, Reuters and UPI are well known in this industry. This has now changed forever thanks to blogs and news aggregation sites.
AP President and CEO Tom Curley does seem to realize that something has to change. In a speech recently:
“We — the news industry — have come to that fork in the road. We must take bold, decisive steps to secure the audiences and funding to support journalism’s essential role in both our economy and democracy, or find ourselves on an ugly path to obscurity.”
We have the power to control how our content flows on the Web. We must use that power if we’re to continue to be financially secure and independent enough to speak truth to power.”
Oh yeah, that’s really great. What do they know about control? Their business model is to pay reporters to travel and write stories and then syndicate those stories to traditional news organizations. Do they think that business model can compete with bloggers all around the world who write for free and often live where the news is? Not to mention that most (if not all) of the bloggers who blog are actually profesionals/experts in what they are blogging about, and when they blog about a topic, are read by other experts/blogger who blog about the topic again. Thus, the ripple effect carries on.
The internet has already changed the way we consume news. I’m even seeing blogs posts being copied and posted in newspapers these days! Thanks to RSS and Atom, aggregations sites have made the need for news syndicators like the AP obsolete. Sorry MR CEO, you’re either slow to realize or you just don’t know what other “good” news to tell your shareholders.
Neerav says
Not so fast David
Newspapers still have press access to people, events and research resources that 99.99% of bloggers don’t.
Also reputable broadsheet newspapers have the budgets to allow their journalists to do in-depth investigative journalism on serious topics that most bloggers don’t cover
admin says
Neerav, my point is that the influence of traditional newspaper and their business model upon the modern society is shrinking. I still read newspaper, but spend more time online reading news and researching on interested topics.