The Changing Landscape of Media

April 10, 2007 | Media Trends

The debate between citizen media and traditional media has been waging for awhile now ““ will they be friends of foes? With ad dollars and subscriptions on the decline, traditional media needs to find a way to modernize and change formats to accommodate for the tectonic shift in the way news is gathered, distributed and consumed””or face extinction.

It seems with all of the recent mergers and partnerships (NowPublic and the Associated Press, Yahoo! and Reuters and the reorg of Gannett’s USA Today’s site) that friends it might be. And it appears the threat of this new medium is dwindling in the eyes of editors, too. In an interesting survey, Newsroom Barometer by TheEditorsWeblog, only 5% of editors across the globe felt that citizen journalism was a threat, see below:

What best describes your view of online / new media journalism and its role in your community?

That is a quite a change from this new medium’s inception, which at first was seen as a format killer.

Editors are seeing that this citizen, or crowd-sourced media, is useful. It allows for expansive access never achieved before with the traditional press. According to InfoTrends, the proliferation of camera phones is enormous - there will be 860 million by 2009; this up from 178 million shipped in 2004. Traditional media is taking note of how this growth has substantially increased “on-the-street” reporting. For example the AP partnered with NowPublic to further expand its network of over 4,100 contributors from over 97 countries to include NowPublic’s reach: 70,000 contributors from over 140 countries. That’s a nice canvas across the globe.

The impact of citizen journalism is undeniable. It also begs the question of how PR will have to evolve, as well, in this new frontier. Food for thought.

-Amy Burke Bessette

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.sparkpr.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/8