Wednesday, January 20, 2010

How News Happens | Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ)

How News Happens

You know, this is an interesting study. It basically shows that (at least for one week in Baltimore) traditional media is by far the primary source of news still. And new media is for broadcasting and rebroadcasting news. So what does happen if/when traditional media (the news gatherers) gets wiped out?

One interesting exception in this study from one week in Baltimore. Twitter as a (minor) news breaking source. From personal experience I get that.

Over xmas I was traveling through YYZ. Thanks to the undiebomber, I knew the security situation at YYZ was out of control. How did I know exactly what was going on? Traditional media? Um. CP24 is good but they weren't inside security. But lots of people on Twitter were. So, by monitoring the twitter stream for yyz security and the airline I was flying, I had very good knowledge of what was happening. Basically a live feed.

Solving what's going on in traditional media now - declining ad revenues leading to scaling back and widespread failures - is a head scratcher. The void will be filled - but how and where the revenues to afford news gathering will come from isn't clear.

Of course, the world would probably be better off with less news anyways.

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