Citation
The State of the News Media 2007. Ed. Amy Mitchell and Tom Rosenstiel. www.journalism.org. 16 Mar.
2007. 19 Mar. 2007 <http://stateofthemedia.org>.
Summary
The people at journalism.org surveyed reporters, journalists, and basically all media people about what’s happening in media now. Basically, the internet is on the rise and newspapers are slowly on the decline because more readers are going online. This means they don’t make as much money, because online advertising isn’t as profitable as print advertising. There’s a lot more, but it’s far too much to summarize.
Quotes
“Is the newspaper industry dying? Not now. On an average day, roughly 51 million people still buy a newspaper, and 124 million in all still read one.“
“When online and print readers are combined, the audience for what newspapers produce is higher than ever.”
Review/Analysis
Newspapers specialized before as a sort of “fourth branch” to the government, as a check on the other branches. If another branch did something wrong, they would be sure that the media would find out about it. But, as newspapers die out, there are less checks on the government. The journalism.org study says that basic monitoring of local governments has already started to worsen. This means governments can get away with more. Newspapers need to stay in business to act as a check on the government.
Also, there is a new Answer Culture, as opposed to the old, questioning culture. Journalism used to pride itself on presenting both sides and letting the viewer/reader decide. Now clearly partisan anchors like Bill O’Reilly are becoming more popular. They are outwardly biased, but still, their ratings are doing well. Apparently, being biased does not hurt your credibility. In fact, in this Answer Culture, it might even help it.
As blogs become bigger, they are gaining attention. What makes them special–their vulnerability and changeability– also presents a problem for them because people can “vandalize” them. So, to battle this problem, some bloggers have begun blogger associations to protect the integrity of blogs and create a code of ethics. However, as they establish these more professional associations, they also lose some of the amateur aspect that is so appealing. I think that, with all these professional bloggers joining together, blogs will become increasingly more credible and reliable because, with the ethics code, they will actually have something to answer to.
here is already evidence that basic monitoring of local government has suffered.
