Monday, May 02, 2005
Journalism at the cross-roads?
Earlier today, I came across a Newsday story that reported that circulation at major U.S. newspapers declined by almost 2% in a six-month period ending in March. This is in keeping with a broad 20-year trend of declining circulation, especially since newspapers faced competition from cable news and the Internet. Add new forms of grassroots journalism like blogging and wikis into the mix and you have to wonder whether journalism as we know it is in real trouble. The Economist commented on this trend in its last issue.
“The basic notion is that if people have the tools to create their own content, they will do that, and that this will result in an emerging global conversation,” says Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media in San Francisco, and the author of “We the Media” (O'Reilly, 2004), a book about, well, grassroots journalism. Take, for instance, OhmyNews in South Korea. Its “main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter,” says Oh Yeon Ho, the boss and founder. Five years old, OhmyNews already has 2m readers and over 33,000 “citizen reporters”, all of them volunteers who contribute stories that are edited and fact-checked by some 50 permanent staff.
With so many new kinds of journalists joining the old kinds, it is also likely that new business models will arise to challenge existing ones. Some bloggers are allowing Google to place advertising links next to their postings, and thus get paid every time a reader of their blog clicks on them. Other bloggers, just like existing providers of specialist content, may ask for subscriptions to all, or part, of their content. Tip-jar systems, where readers click to make small payments to their favourite writers, are catching on. In one case last year, an OhmyNews article attacking an unpopular court verdict reaped $30,000 in tips from readers, though most of the site's revenues come from advertising.
But it remains uncertain what mix of advertising revenue, tips and subscriptions will fund the news providers of the future, and how large a role today's providers will have. What is clear is that the control of news—what constitutes it, how to prioritise it and what is fact—is shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news provider to the audience itself.
In the meanwhile, a recent cover story of Businessweek declared that blogs will change your business. The issue coincided with the launch of Businessweek's own blog, called Blogspotting, written by Stephen Baker and Heather Green. In some ways, it's good to see at least some journalists get their heads out the sand and recognize that the fundamental rules of their profession are being altered. Of course, the mainstream media will catch on about 5 years from now.
“The basic notion is that if people have the tools to create their own content, they will do that, and that this will result in an emerging global conversation,” says Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media in San Francisco, and the author of “We the Media” (O'Reilly, 2004), a book about, well, grassroots journalism. Take, for instance, OhmyNews in South Korea. Its “main concept is that every citizen can be a reporter,” says Oh Yeon Ho, the boss and founder. Five years old, OhmyNews already has 2m readers and over 33,000 “citizen reporters”, all of them volunteers who contribute stories that are edited and fact-checked by some 50 permanent staff.
With so many new kinds of journalists joining the old kinds, it is also likely that new business models will arise to challenge existing ones. Some bloggers are allowing Google to place advertising links next to their postings, and thus get paid every time a reader of their blog clicks on them. Other bloggers, just like existing providers of specialist content, may ask for subscriptions to all, or part, of their content. Tip-jar systems, where readers click to make small payments to their favourite writers, are catching on. In one case last year, an OhmyNews article attacking an unpopular court verdict reaped $30,000 in tips from readers, though most of the site's revenues come from advertising.
But it remains uncertain what mix of advertising revenue, tips and subscriptions will fund the news providers of the future, and how large a role today's providers will have. What is clear is that the control of news—what constitutes it, how to prioritise it and what is fact—is shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news provider to the audience itself.
In the meanwhile, a recent cover story of Businessweek declared that blogs will change your business. The issue coincided with the launch of Businessweek's own blog, called Blogspotting, written by Stephen Baker and Heather Green. In some ways, it's good to see at least some journalists get their heads out the sand and recognize that the fundamental rules of their profession are being altered. Of course, the mainstream media will catch on about 5 years from now.
