Being involved as I am in "new media", I'm captivated by the changes and upheavals going on in the MSM and classic journalism. A few months ago, I shared a lengthy dissertation on the subject by Kevin Carson.
In a similar vein, here's a recent op-ed piece by Professor Robert Picard on what's killing the old guard:
To comprehend journalistic value creation, we need to focus on the benefits it provides. Journalism creates functional, emotional, and self-expressive benefits for consumers. Functional benefits include providing useful information and ideas...
These benefits used to produce significant economic value. Not today. That's because producers and providers have less control over the communication space than ever before. In the past, the difficulty and cost of operation, publication, and distribution severely limited the number of content suppliers. This scarcity raised the economic value of content. That additional value is gone today because a far wider range of sources of news and information exist.
The primary value that is created today comes from the basic underlying value of the labor of journalists. Unfortunately, that value is now near zero.
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Today, ordinary adults can observe and report news, gather expert knowledge, determine significance, add audio, photography, and video components, and publish this content far and wide (or at least to their social network) with ease. And much of this is done for no pay.
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Unfortunately, journalistic labor has become commoditized. Most journalists share the same skills sets and the same approaches to stories, seek out the same sources, ask similar questions, and produce relatively similar stories[...]Across the news industry, processes and procedures for news gathering are guided by standardized news values, producing standardized stories in standardized formats that are presented in standardized styles. The result is extraordinary sameness and minimal differentiation.
With this stuff in mind, take gander at Robin Brownlee's defense of Darren Dreger today over at Flamesnation. All of his points about protecting sources, the fluidity of deals in the NHL and the need to present information "now" in order to feed demand and avoid being scooped are all probably fair given the landscape these guys operate in. Which is often why I find so little value in what is produced via this method. I think the criticism of Dreger's fluff piece and Brownlee's resultant protestations are probably both simultaneously valid. '"N" is the best we can do under "X", "Y" and "Z" conditions' doesn't change the fact that "N" (to my mind, at least) is pap. "You're doing it wrong" is my response, even if I'm somewhat sympathetic to the circumstances.
There's a push by the overlords at my other place to get accreditation for the various contracted bloggers. While I wish them well in their endeavors, the possibility holds absolutely no interest for me whatsoever.
