I appreciate your reply. Whatever may come in the wake of the traditional media has to be better. I foresee legions of smaller reporting entities, much as described in the times of Pulitzer and Hearst. I think this is a good thing.
Over the past many decades as media consolidation took place there grew an arrogant based corrupt desire to push news. To influence rather than merely report. The MSM is now a collusive collection of corruption that actively seeks to tilt the axis of truth from its immutable moorings to abject relativism. It is a gift of mercy that this cancer is excised from the host.
Here's something I added on the “Online Reporters and Editors” LinkedIn discussion board. I think it has specific relevance for a lot of us on Free Republic.
As the traditional media fall apart, frustrated conservative reporters with a bit of an entrepreneurial mindset have some **MAJOR** opportunities at the local level.
Let me make it crystal clear that I'm not defending blogging. I am painfully aware of the problems caused by untrained people who don't know what they're doing. My point is that blogs are filling in and doing the sort of work that competent reporters are no longer doing on the local level, and which conservatives who **DO** know what they are doing could be providing via a functional business model now that the monopoly of the traditional media has been broken.
The First Amendment exists for a reason. Those of us who value the Constitution need to remember those reasons, and act accordingly.
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MY POST:
I do, however, think this is showing that the collapse of traditional media coverage of city councils, school boards, etc., isn't resulting in lack of attention but rather attention by bloggers who may or may not have agendas and whose agendas may or may not be obvious.
That sounds a lot like the media environment of the “Yellow Journalism” of the penny press days of the 1800s. We can object to what happened back then, but the reality is back then newspapers were being read and today they aren't.
My view is that we'd better take a long hard look at why newspapers today aren't working, compare ourselves to what was being done by newspapers earlier in media history when they did work, and learn from what the past has to teach us — both examples we can emulate and bad things we can learn to avoid.
Technological changes are the engine driving the collapse of tradition media, but they aren't the only factor. Technological changes simply allowed alternatives to break into what had become a monopoly market. We in the profession of journalism may not like those alternatives — and there are a lot of things that are quite correctly criticized about them — but we'd better figure out why people like the alternatives and figure out how to offer a better product or we aren't going to have jobs much longer.