Monday, March 30, 2009

As the pendulum swings!

I totally called this. The Huffington Post (which I don't read), the website that writes about originally researched news articles and explains them the way your friend would: opinionated, with a point of view, will now CREATE journalism.

Awhile back, as I was thinking of the future of my job, and the tension right now between blogs and newspapers. The problem is that newspapers put a lot of time and money into their articles, and then earn money through subscribers and ad revenues. Blogs put very little time and money into their pieces, but can turn a profit by writing "voiced" opinions of the news.

I predicted that blogs would cannibalize on newspapers until they no longer existed, and there was no more original content to mine. Then, in order to survive themselves, they would need to come up with original ideas themselves. With journalism and its big budgets already flaming out, the new projects would be on a smaller and more manageable scale (or, in this twist, funded by a non-profit). Journalism will rise from the ashes; a baby instead of a Jabba the Hut, overgrown menace.

I see this happening more than once, as blogs struggle with the investments they must make to create original content, that in turn are cannibalized by other blogs. There will definitely be a few pendulum swings before everything settles. I even see subscriber-based New York Times as within purview; I know personally I cannot live without my newspaper, and if the subscription is cheap and information again becomes barrier-based, I will need to pay money to cross the barrier.

Oh, journalism.

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