Week 8 Response

After taking some more time to read and deliberate what I read, I have some thoughts on my framing questions from earlier:

• Newspapers can only survive if they change their roles.  The report mentioned that only six newspapers shut down in 2009 and those were largely the second papers in their markets.  To me, this says that newspapers need to focus on providing local news.  People go to their local newspapers for information they can’t get on CNN — obituaries, local news, upcoming local events, and police blotters.  In the past when there were less media outlets, newspapers could afford to largely run wire stories that would appear in hundreds of other places because their readers wouldn’t have an opportunity to see the news elsewhere.  That isn’t going to fly now.  I also think that stating that only a small percentage of news comes from sources other than the few large, legacy organizations is misleading — a large portion of news has come from the AP and Reuters wire services for a long time and stats on these organizations are (conveniently?) left out of this report, as far as I can tell.
• As reporters at traditional news sources lose their jobs, the writers of the State of the Media Report seem to believe that news will stop being reported all together.  It seems like quite “the sky is falling” routine that is common nowadays.  I think that news sources that are doing well (like cable tv networks) will end up picking up the slack.  Even if these drastic projections of the news industry are true, the cable networks are going to need SOMETHING to talk about for 24 hours a day.  They will have to beef up their investments in reporting staff out of necessity.  I also wonder how the news wires will factor into keeping the news flowing — their articles seem to be everywhere.
• I don’t know if community journalism will be as big as I keep hearing it will be.  The State of the Media Report mentioned that most reporting from blogs and Twitter links back to legacy news agencies — to me, this says that we really don’t trust regular citizens for our news.  I think citizen journalism will fall mostly into two areas:  the coverage of local news in smaller areas (where the newspapers are often atrocious in terms of immediacy and English skills) and for breaking news of unplanned events, such as disasters. I think back to how bad my local paper is at managing to report on local events at all and wish that there was a reasonable solution to read about all the news that they either deemed unfit to print or didn’t care enough to report on.