the Future of Papers - the Economist discovers blogs

Not that I've read the Economist article yet, I have a long train journey tomorrow and don't want to spoil it.

Yeah. Thing is, people who want to read the news find a way to read the news. Online is easier. Sometime soon, and even a bit right now, your cell phone will replace your newspaper. That's not too pie-in-the-sky of a thing to imagine, I don't think.

I'm rather looking forward to the day when the Sun Times is just a flashy sports section.

it's a bit like the problem with the economist's reporting on illegal downloading: if technological changes/behavior make the big firms scared or less profitable, it's not the same thing as the type of media becoming "less healthy"

i'm beginning to believe that blogs will not "replace" anything, but will affect other things, and will continue to be much as they are: another established and understood form of dissemminating (and, crucially, organizing) information. the economist skates too easily over the issue of actual paid boring shoeleather reporting being replaced. blogs are still parasites, in the way that most sections of the newspaper are parasites on the front page (in a sense). just cos glenn reynolds says he has "correspondents" doesn't mean a damn thing, sorry.

one thing they don't talk abt, and what is too early to really get a bead on, is the future of foreign reporting, ie, if the the net means that everything is everywhere, why should i bother reading, say the NYT's foreign coverage when I can just go to newspapers in india or poland or wherever. and why should people there not read the NYT for us news, etc.

one thing needs serious debunking: this OhMyNews thing has been lauded by a bunch of ppl (one guy I've heard lecture is trying it here in the US). but the success of it's business model — readers write all the content, and get paid based on popularity and donations to their specific article — was determined heavily by the S Korean media environment at the time: very tech-savvy & wired up population + deeply unfree news climate. these conditions exist almost nowhere else.

Pardon me, but this is bullshit. The media has never been god-like, it has always been a natural, self-regulating system of checks and balances. THAT'S WHAT IT DOES, at its best, anyway. Murdoch's words sounds eerily to me like he wants more Fox news-like stations, and less BBC. He wants less checks and balances. He wants to carve deeper niches, and get people more invested in niche media. He's an evil presence.

Bloggers are so light in this. For the purposes of any meaningful argument about what is happening to newspapers and TV news, we have to separate the technology from the content. The technology of the internet brings more news faster to anyone who wants it. This is a great thing. The fact that it is bringing less, and less reliable, news to more people is a failing of the traditional news outlets to keep up, perhaps a flagging willingness to keep up, not of waning interest in traditional news (and certainly not a waning of its central role in democracy). Don't forget that it's to the benefit of Murdoch and to the detriment of factual reporting if everyone believes that the next logical step is to further decentralize news gathering and dismantle traditional ways of getting news.

And don't even tell me about bloggers taking down Dan Rather. That's not any kind of a triumph for anyone, not in the larger sense.

*Weeps bitter tears as life's dream is crushed*

Distributed Monoliths, thats what he is after