The
USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review covers a recent comprehensive
report by the
Project for Excellence in Journalism, an industry effort to profile every aspect of American journalism on an annual basis. As PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel sees it, "...journalism is in the middle of an epochal transformation, as momentous probably as the invention of the telegraph or television." It's a transformation that puts journalism at risk in the view of PEJ, as the eyeballs are surging towards an online model that is not yet producing the revenues required to support top-notch journalism operations. The stats show that online news is getting youngsters' attention, something that TV and print just haven't cracked, so there's no doubt where the future of news is going. But how quickly? While the study shows that only 15 percent think of online outlets as their primary source of news, 26 percent looked at online news within the last day - about half of today's online population. Will news outlets be able to bridge the revenue gap effectively in era of rapid transition? As noted in our earlier
news analysis, there is less and less to hold together traditional news operations as other kinds of content aggregation - including user desktop integration via RSS-fed weblogs - become increasingly powerful. The issue may not be whether news organizations as they exist today will be able to make the transition as much as whether they will be anything like they exist today. It's not just the technology that's changing but the very nature of how news is formed. The social networking and hyperlinking provided by Weblogs, for example, provides much of the source validation provided by traditional journalism, an organic kind of quality validation that precludes many traditional editorial controls. It may not be that journalism quality is declining in the face of online forces as much as it is that online journalism is redefining how quality is achieved, and for what purposes. News formation is a key focal point for
vContent today, a concentration of the very human aspects of content with the truly revolutionary aspects of humble but world-changing technologies.