Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Jim Lehrer sticks up for traditional media

Jim Lehrer sticks up for traditional mediaThe bloggers are talkers, commentators, not reporters. The talk-show hosts are reactors, commentators, not reporters," Lehrer said. "The search engines can search but do not report. All of them, every single one of them, have to have the news in order to exist and thrive.

Let's grant him that. The question is then, how will serious reporters outside public broadcasting make a living as the paper media shrivel and the broadcast media replace news by infotainment? Even if online advertising would be a sufficient revenue source to support the reporters, how would the revenue flow to reporters without the current (obsolescent) news production mechanisms? Maybe some new form of syndication, but we don't have those mechanisms in place yet (open access scientific publication suffers form a parallel problem). We better start researching the design of new syndication mechanisms.

1 comment:

Pifplaf said...

It's not the answer to the issue but, still, related. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-11-07-schiffrin-en.html