The mainstream media in the US isn't really losing audience as much as it had been hyped. Certainly not because of people switching over to the Internet as a news source.
The Internet has profoundly changed journalism, but not necessarily in ways that were predicted even a few years ago. It was believed at one point that the Net would democratise the media, offering many new voices, stories and perspectives.
Yet the news agenda actually seems to be narrowing, with many websites primarily packaging news that is produced elsewhere, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's (PEJ) annual State of the News Media report.
There is no single or finished news product anymore. As news consumption becomes continual, more new effort is put into producing incremental updates, as brief as 40-character emails sent from reporters directly to consumers without editing.
Service also broadens the definition of what journalists must supply. Story telling and agenda setting are now insufficient, the report says. "News people are uncertain how the core values of accuracy and verification will hold up. Some of the experiments, even the experimenters think, are questionable. And people are being stretched thinner, posing hard questions about how to manage time and where to concentrate. But the hope is that service, more than storytelling, could prove a key to unlocking new economics."
A news organisation and a news website are no longer final destinations. Every page of a website—even one containing a single story—is now its own front page. And each piece of content competes on its own with all other information on that topic linked to by blogs, “digged†by user news sites, sent in emails, or appearing in searches.
"As much as half of every webpage, designers advise, should be devoted to helping people find what they want on the rest of the site or the Web. That change is already occurring." A year ago, the PEJ study of news websites found that only three of 24 major websites from traditional news organisations offered links to outside content. Eleven of those sites now offer them. Some of this may simply be automated, which may be a service of limited value.
Citizen journalism is not making much headway. The most promising parts of citizen input currently are new ideas, sources, comments and to some extent pictures and video. But citizens posting news content has proven less valuable, with too little that is new or verifiable. And the scepticism is not restricted to the traditional mainstream media or “MSM.â€
The array of citizen-produced news and blog sites is reaching a meaningful level. But most of these sites do not let outsiders do more than comment on the site’s own material, the same as most traditional news sites. Few allow the posting of news, information, community events or even letters to the editors. And blog sites are even more restricted. In short, rather than rejecting the “gatekeeper†role of traditional journalism, for now citizen journalists and bloggers appear for now to be recreating it in other places.
