Response: Week 8

While people currently turn to major news sources for big events, (September 11, elections, etc.) will people turn to random citizen journalists for the same information?  IF professional journalism declines and citizen journalists fail to form “professional” organizations how will society respond to getting news from “average joes”?

If citizen journalists fail to form organizations and professional journalism continues to decline I think society will respond well to receiving their news from average citizens.  Take the London tube bombings for example, the masses had no problem seeing the video a citizen took on their cell phone and viewing this raw footage as hard news.  However, I think news as we know it will change a great deal if only average citizens do the reporting.  There will probably be far fewer lengthy, textual articles and more pictures and videos.  Furthermore, the quality of the images, video and writing will go down because average citizens can’t afford top quality equipement like professional organizations can.  I don’t think the masses will take this decline in quality badly.  On the contrary, I think the masses will view footage and picture of lower quality in higher esteem than the professional media because these images will obviously reveal truth, and there will be no questions of someone editing images or video to change meaning.

Community activities were reported as the largest area of uploading activity in relation to citizen journalism.  While all forms of news are struggling, what about the hyper niche markets?  If journalism transitioned to hyper niche topics could the financial situation facing news outlets change?  Would people pay for hyper niche topics since this is a fairly untouched sector of the journalism industry?

I used to work for a small town, weekly paper, and this publication is not declining like other larger news publications.  On the contrary, it’s thriving.  This paper is doing so well because it is the only place to get hyper local news.  People do pay for this old-fashioned paper, and I think of newspapers separated into different publications of hyper-niche news people would pay for this information as well.  If larger papers like the Charlotte Observer split up their paper into different publications, like an arts and entertainment publication, a financial publication and a news publication and focused everything in these publication on things relating to Charlotte people might be willing to pay for it.  Hyper-local publications aren’t just for small towns, but in larger towns like Charlotte people might not be willing to pay for all the news currently presented in the Observer.  Chopping up the paper, localizing it and selling it in separate sections might just work.

In the Overview section of the reading, the online economics survey section discussed how online advertising is struggling because people fail to even notice the advertisements online.  Banner blindness is now a common trend in the online community.  How can online advertising change to be more effective?  What are some other ideas?  It seems as though all advertisers try to advertise the same way online, but this isn’t working and not many solutions are being discussed.

This issue is one plaguing online advertisers, and they have started down the track to finding solutions.  Online advertisements are starting to resemble advertisements on radio and television.  Youtube, Hulu and Pandora now have advertisements mixed in with their content.  It’s possible that a great majority of websites will soon make people site through short video or audio commercials before they can continue surfing the net.  We do know that putting textual advertisement on webpages doesn’t work because people don’t even see them.  Video and audio advertisements might be the solution.  If a video ad pops up on the screen and doesn’t have an exit button, there is nothing the user can do but sit through it.  This method of advertising would be extremely annoying, but it would get attention.  Furthermore, the ads could be very personalized to the user based on their online buying and search habits.

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