Save Journalism, Not Media

I’ve been reading quite a bit about new media vs. old media over the past few months and I am starting to think that this “us vs. them” positioning is somewhat of a fallacy. New Media does not need to overthrow Old Media or vice versa. In fact, New Media needs to save Old Media.

News audiences are migrating online at a rapid rate. Publishers have traded their print dollars for digital pennies and those pennies can no longer pay for real investigative journalism.

Many New Media advocates suggest the the new age of free information will kill Old Media. Yes – you will probably hear about big public events like voter riots in Iran on twitter before you will read about them in the Wall Street Journal.

Blogs, the most common New Media platform, are great. They are lively, opinionated, and a lot of very smart people use them as a convenient communications platform. But, will an unpaid blogger interview five sources and corroborate facts before clicking the “PUBLISH” button.

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