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The title of the Drudge Report frontpage is now "Drudge Report 2009®."
Anyway, Drudge has directed me to the Denver Post, where I've learned that at least 30 newspapers are looking to sell.Across the United States, more than 30 daily newspapers are for sale, and buyers are scarce.
From Los Angeles to New York, leading newspapers have slashed newsrooms with buyout offers, and when those failed to reach budget-cutting goals, with layoffs.
The newspaper industry has been caught in a tailspin for three years, a trend variously blamed on plummeting ad revenues, declining readership, growing competition from the Internet and a deepening national recession.
So it appears as though some cities will simply be without a daily newspaper as soon as next year. Bad news, certainly, but the newspaper industry is not alone. Economic times are rough all around, and the rapid cultural shift in technology use has left many industries playing catch-up. Journalists will benefit from their predisposition to being aware of the latest news and trends and innovation will hopefully follow.
A smaller journalism industry is a bad thing for democracy. If online journalism isn't the profession's salvation, a government-funded media akin to the BBC may not be an impossibility in the U.S.
According to Wikipedia, The Huffington Post is based out of New York. Why, then, does it have a dedicated page for Chicago news? Being from Chicago, I'd assumed that I had at some point told the site where I was from and it then was targeting me with local stuff. This appears to not be the case - does anyone know if that Chicago page was around before Obama's primary win? - though I think it's a good idea. Considering their fairly dynamic layout and how often they create new Big News pages, I would assume it's relatively painless to create a page that would display all the news that is marked as concerning a certain region.
I don't benefit a ton from the Chicago page - it's mostly national news, anyway, what with President-elect Obama making the city Washington West - but if the site could detect your IP address and automatically deliver you a page with all the stories tagged with the nearest major city, I would think a lot of people would find that helpful.
In yet another example of how The Huffington Post has outpaced The Drudge Report in its implementation of new Web technology, I just now noticed that The Post offers their very own version of the Firefox browser. While Drudge's site still has its quaint appeal, The Post can now pipe their content directly to users even if they're on an entirely different site. It's not much more than a reskin of the traditional Firefox browser with the addition of a news ticker and section shortcuts, but every little bit helps when trying to keep users coming back.
Web 2.0 features are springing up everywhere - even the minimalist Google has now added some wiki functionality to its search results pages. Drudge, it appears, doesn't care to keep up - perhaps his niche is just being someone to take your tips or leaks to.
Though not explicitly awarded for online coverage, the New Orleans Times-Picayune received a Pulitzer in 2006 for its Hurricane Katrina coverage. Of course, following the storm, the paper was only publishing online for days at a time, so the Pulitzer was in many ways a legitimization of the practice. The Times-Picayune site NOLA.com also became a hub for displaced residents looking to connect with loved ones or discuss the disaster. The citizen journalism that sprung up there, while maybe unique only for the scale of its subject, was also heralded for its value.
The effectiveness with which the paper covered the natural disaster on the Internet is just one example of how online journalism can respond to similar catastrophes with unparalleled success. Blogs break news all the time, but never are they more ahead of the curve (nor is Twitter) than when a natural disaster strikes. Following a recent minor earthquake in California, people had texted messages about feeling the tremors while they were still occurring. That speed simply can't be matched by other delivery methods, and in such a situation just a few minutes of advance notice can be profoundly valuable to citizens.
To continue painting a bleak picture of the future of online journalism, people on the Internet won't differentiate between sources when they go to share a story - with perhaps the exception of taking card to avoid Fox News whenever possible. These users will distribute the link for CBS 6 in Appleton just as soon as they will one from CNN.com since the hard facts of the story are probably the same anyway. Chances are, only one publication's take on any given news event is going to achieve popularity on Digg.
There are two ways to avoid this near-inevitability: Either be the New York Times and have the image of being the national paper of record, or foster a community that appeals to these users. Of course, I've already ranted about the problems in attempting to attract a loyal community to a news site. So since any given article, in many cases, exists in a vacuum, how can media companies more effectively brand? Does loyalty online only apply to communities like forums and social bookmarking sites? Is attracting a devoted Web audience the only way for journalism sites to increase their consistent return traffic?
So ad revenue on the Internet is, as far as I can tell, so rare it's nearly mythical in nature. Therefore, while newspapers and media companies look to move online and primarily publish there, the issue of profitability still looms large. One major reason sites won't get the traffic and therefore the money they desire is because there is little brand loyalty on the Internet - not when it comes to your standard hard news, at least. Sure, casual Webgoers are probably more apt to type in the URL of their hometown paper, but the money-making demographic has no such inclination. That demographic - which I lovingly refer to as "people on the Internet (as opposed to people who just use the Internet) - comprises the users who perpetuate and propel the entity that is the World Wide Web. This group is key because, while it isn't large, it is vocal and active, and it prioritizes receiving and sharing information quickly and is, as a result, taste-making and agenda-setting in the community at large.
Unfortunately for companies looking to profit off this group, it also consists of the individuals that pirate movies and music, lobby for net neutrality and believe information should be free. Like me, they probably have Adblock installed and thus won't even be aware when an ad is served up.
To build off my last post, Internet users segmenting themselves based on partisan affiliation or the like is simply symptomatic of the Internet's construction. Groupthink is king, as evidenced by every forum and discussion board in existence. Socially unacceptable behavior finds safe haven in the darkest corners of the Web, breeding even more deviancy (and probably persecution complexes). As the old adage goes, the Internet makes you stupid. For online journalism outlets, unless you've miraculously cultivated a community that attracts people interested in objective, complete reporting and civil debate, your audience will slowly but surely skew toward one segment of society. The question is, is that okay?
So long as a newspaper's content remains unaffected, does it matter that a site's visitors are somewhat homogeneous? This has already been an issue in journalism, as newspaper usually service a distinct geographic area, but is it counterintuitive to similarly limit your audience online?
