Chicken Soup

Here are several notes on topics we have discussed both in class and on this blog.

(1) Can we expect blogs to supplant traditional news sources?

I would construct this argument on my own, but newspaperdeathwatch leaves me no room for original thought.

My main argument against Blogs supplanting newspapers assumed that Blogs did not have the resources or motivation to challenge traditional news outlets. These articles, from newspaperdeathwatch, may show evidence of a different trend.

In this piece, Daniel Kimerling examines how newspapers were absolutely replaced by amateurs reporting in the recent Mumbai attacks.

Yet, for all the doom and gloom which one cannot help but feeling when looking at the current state of the newspaper business in the United States, I may have seen the future of News. Not surprisingly that future intersects with that of the Internet in many significant ways. And surprisingly, I saw it for the first time during the horrific events of last week’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai. For those of us who need up to date information on global events, normal sources for such news are CNN, the BBC, or other similar organizations. However, these traditional media organizations were terribly slow in providing news coverage of the tragedy. How was information spread? Surprisingly it was through Twitter, the oft-mentioned microblogging platform. Because Twitter offers short, near real time communications, it allowed people under attack to transmit information, allowed media events to aggregate information, and allowed consumers to receive information. It has turned into what one might call, for lack of a better term, a crowd-sourced information dissemination system. The power of distributed nodes, a hall mark of the Twitter model, is especially powerful in this and other emergent situations as it offers speed and agility, in stark contrast to the adjectives associated with a television journalist’s satellite truck or a print journalist’s laptop. A second exciting technology that demonstrated its value during the Mumbai attacks was that of people powered search, most commonly associated with the search start-up Mahalo. Mahalo works by having writers curate search pages, combining aspects of Wikipedia, About.com, and Google. In the case of breaking news they have a team that can build pages dynamically, and aggregate content from across the web, whether social media or standard content. In doing so, they can adapt nearly as quickly as real world events can occur. Breaking news might have actually proven to be the best use case for people-powered search.

Mumbai is a direct affront to my argument.

A second relevant article discussed the expansion of the Huffington Post. With more money at its disposal, the HP will at least have the opportunity to expand into traditional news collection. This is not a direct affront to my claim, for two reasons: (a) the Article states that HP intends to use the money to hire more business and editorial talent, not reporters, and (b) can HP move into objective news collection even with its clearly liberal slant. And if it does, does that mean that blog dominated news means a reversion to the era of partisan papers?

Finally, newspaperdeathwatch provides an excellent example of a blog actually morphing into a news service:

Politico Reports Strong Response to New Wire Service

Attempting to exploit newspapers’ frustration with the Associated Press, CNN has stepped into the breach with its own international news network. But the cable company may face some unexpected competition: The Politico. The Washington-based boutique news service, which specializes in Capitol Hill coverage, has signed up 67 newspapers for its news service over the last three months. They include the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as all 27 dailies owned by Advance Publications. Several of its new clients are in dire financial circumstances and have cut back upon or eliminated their Washington bureaus. That makes Politico’s value proposition compelling. As we’re written before, The Politico continues to be an example of how specialized journalism can fill the gap left by broad-based media titans in an era of micro markets.

I guess this is a pretty strong argument that Blogs can indeed function as new services. Now the question becomes, will they be able to maintain their identity?

(2) The Pew Center provides further evidence of the Democratic domination of the Internet. What is important is that these numbers are for the 2008 cycle, and they show evidence that the younger (democratic) demographic continues to dominate the Internet...



...however, Republicans are not so far behind...



(3) Finally, here is an interesting study that indicates Stewart may just be newsworthy after all. Here is an abstract:

The Daily Show is much funnier than traditional newscasts, but a new study from Indiana University says it has the same amount of meat on its bones when it comes to coverage of the news. The brand of news coverage Jon Stewart and the rest of The Daily Show's staff brings to the airwaves is just as substantive as traditional news programs like World News Tonight and the CBS Evening News, according to the study conducted by IU assistant professor of telecommunications Julia R. Fox and a couple of graduate students.

The researchers looked at coverage of the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions and the first presidential debate of the fall campaign, all of which were covered by the mainstream broadcast news outlets and The Daily Show. Individual broadcasts of the nightly news and corresponding episodes of The Daily Show were analyzed by the researchers, who found that the "average amounts of video and audio substance in the broadcast network news stories" were no different from The Daily Show. Perhaps more telling, The Daily Show delivered longer stories on the topic.