Eric Alterman - Does Print Journalism Have a Future?

[taritrott]

I disagree with his claim that "there's very little reporting in TV at all". NBC Nightly News is an example of excellent television reporting... it's the best program in the business. I recall recently excellent reporting from NBC after the Haitian earth quake, the same from CNN and Anderson Cooper. This man is wrong. The spoken word will always be more powerful than the written.

[croscream]

Why will we keep good news reporting? People need reliable information about the economy, religion, science, crime, education, arts; newspapers don't usually deliver good information about these subjects; magazines, books and websites usually do. The web will give way to more professional newsbroadcasts and special informationportal that will link you to smaller, more thematised information websites.

[croscream]

For example; there will be numerous good quality websites that deal with average grounded news. Next we will see websites that specialise and become hubs for entire communities looking for the same kind of information. The police website will report on crimes, the courts will document some of there workings online, churches will use there backhand to fund good quality newssites, universities and learning institution will use some of there funding to create learning centered newspages.

[croscream]

Writers and people with special writing skills will become members of small communities hoping to promote there person and there writing, something unheared of in the newspaper industry. Thousands of young writers will try this out. Then when we have many and broadly specialized websites, the communities can create there own webcontent. New and bigger types of newssites will evolve.

[croscream]

The real big websites will be able to pull enough funding from advertisement as the old newspapers because some of these websites will grow big enough to pull in hundreds of millions of people. some only a few million, but when you can link to other websites it is just a matter of concentrating on the juicy newsarticles and allow independant websites to post there work on your website.