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Blogs to kill traditional media, part II

Thursday | December 9, 2004 | 7:54 pm  

Outline

Blogs are really self-publishing If freedom of press belongs to those who own…

Now, in all respects, bloggers are both feedback providers, audience members, and publishers.

If they’re publishers, then they’re traditional media’s competition.

There’s more of them, they do this in their spare time (link to amateurs taking over industries…), they have much, much lower overhead.

Bye, bye, traditional media?

Ah, but what about access — only “we” can talk to the stars, the officials, the politicos.

For how long? What if they blog? They release canned press conferences and press releases via blogs/rss.

It’s scary to think that officials would no longer have to actually answer questions from an adversarial press.

But even some critics would say we’re not asking the tough questions.

Another criticism is that we practice he said, she said journalism. Side A, Side B, add a lede and a headline and your done.

That’s a criticism that probably cuts closer to home.

And its a brand of journalism that loses value in a blog-ified/RSS-ified world.

After all I can subscribe to my liberal bloggers and conservative bloggers and have the side a side b brought to me automatically.

Or worse, I can ignore the side I disagree with…

Google can pull news together now in crappy HTML format, imagine what they can do with RSS feeds. They’ll bring together automatically stitched news stories from bloggers.

On the web, content is king, and everywhere.

And “we” make our livings by bundling content, with (often annoying ads).

So what do we do? Can we survive in a world where bundling decreases value?

Tune in again…

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