The Internet and Converging Media Journalism Principles and Practices

What We Will Do in Two Concluding Lectures Look at some underlying assumptions that may be moving us off track Examine some emerging economic and editorial models (realizing some overlap) Look at a couple missing pieces Examine why the issue is so critical...for reasons we sometimes don’t consider Offer at least one suggestion for solving the problem I’ve cited

First, Let’s Examine Some Assumptions... Assumption 1: Internet killed news news because people can get it for free No question partially true -- Hourglass Newspapers seen revenue drop 50 percent in 3 years TV down by about 25 percent Newsmagazines Time and Newsweek cut half their staff since mid 80s Newspapers earned only about $3.1 billion from online ads in previous year, compared to $37 billion from traditional advertising

But There are Other Reasons for Problems in the News Industry Classified lost not to news but to Google -- which makes 80 percent of income off searches News organizations did plenty of damage to themselves by massive debt Slow to react and often focused on the trivial -- comment boxes Collapse of economy didn’t help, but not entirely to blame And big one relates to bottled water, get to at end

Assumption #2: People get their news from new media, fragmented media -- so old media are irrelevant Pew Center analysis of over a million blogs found that 80 percent t information came directly from “legacy media” Only 14 percent of top news sites produce largely original news 80 percent of web traffic to news sites goes to 7 providers -- CNN, NYT, Yahoo News, MSN among them -- and if you look at Yahoo News, basically aggregation of AP, AFP, Reuters, Bloomberg

Assumption #3: This has never happened before so it’s a Zombie Apocalypse Read AOL’s new master plan -- optimize for search engine. Is this the zombie Apocalypse? The same thing happened before Civil War Remember how home video was going to wipe out movie theaters? The opposite happened Recorded music was going to put musicians out of work Radio would be the end of recorded music

It took centuries for printing press to make its effect realized Assumption #4: There’s one big thing that is going to change everything It took centuries for printing press to make its effect realized It took pretty much a whole century for technology and society to create modern newspaper industry. Media needed a monetary base -- cash economy, gave birth to classified ads as people move from working at home to cities

Assumption #4 Continued Took a decade or so for radio to establish itself as an advertising medium -- toothpaste Took longer to overcome eleemosynary -- economic model And for all those trying to invent the next big thing, it often goes in its own direction… Edison Bell And in fact Sarnoff

Conclusion Just because we don’t know the answer doesn’t mean there isn’t one, and we’re in good company