Sunday, May 10, 2009

The American Press on Suicide Watch

I'm not optimistic about the public at large paying for hard news coverage. I'd love to be proven wrong.

read more | digg story

2 comments:

Unknown said...

So long as the hard news coverage is the same old corporate crap, the public will not pay. We can already hear the lies for free.

The internet is in the process of killing print media and television. Its immediacy and interactivity cannot be rivaled or replaced. The democratizing aspects of the internet, where everyone can be a journalist, are a welcome change.

I'm not saying there is no downside to this, just that it is inevitable. The effects are already readily apparent in the financial troubles of the corporate media, which will only get worse.

Eric said...

Unfortunately, I'm not so confident that volunteer community journalists have the capacity to replace the trained journalists. If there is one lesson that I want my students to learn - it's that journalism should be hard work. And people don't do hard work for free.

Also - unfortunately many people are quite satisfied being ignorant. So - it's not in the interest of corporate giants to inform the public about many topics - and the public doesn't think it's important to be informed. Rational ignorance wins. The elites can rule the world!