journalism in transition

1.Trends: Shift Happens2.The Market Abhors A

Vacuum3.It’s Not Just Newspapers4.The Evolution To Real-

Time News

38%

Pew, Jan 2010

26%

Pew, 2010

9%

Pew, 2006

17%

Pew, 2010

Trends News Consumption

• Mid-1980s : 22%• 1998 : 21%• 2005 : 19%• 2008 : 10.8% (1st 3 qtrs)

1999: Yahoo! buys GeoCities, host to 3.5 million individual Web sites (most abandoned!)

1999: the Poynter Institute starts the “MediaNews” blog

2002: Google buys Blogger; estimate of 500,000 blogs worldwide in total

February 2002: Salon and Fox News add blogs

2003: Iraq war gives rise to war blogger 2009: 6 million blogs on Wordpress.com;

>1B monthly pageviews; Yahoo! shutters GeoCities

Where Are We Today?

WestSeattleBlogProPublicaSpot.usNYT, WSJ, NPR et al on iPhone, iPad,

Android

The Charlotte Observer used a blog format to report on Hurricane Bonnie in August 1998; “Dispatches from the Coast” is the first known use of blog to cover a breaking news story.

Increasingly Disintermediated

Transmission Networks

Transmission Speed

A New Genre

D versus @ versus RTFollow versus Friend (“block”)Favorites Broadcast (one-way) versus

Converse (two-way)Nibble v Full CourseMany v FewTinyUrl et al

Twitter & Iran

Amplified voices of dissentFacilitated misinformation

(intentional and unintentional) Incomplete storyEmotional Triggered MSM response

The mass audience is deadPublishing is free (push-button)The cost of dealing with atoms

goes up as readership goes down

Today’s professional listens as well as talks

This is not a cyclical change

Photos are iStockPhoto or fair use: Crowd, http://www.flickr.com/photos/twose/887903401/ Megaphone,

http://warkscol.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/superchick_megaphone_logo_hi.jpg

Kent State, photo John Paul Filo, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings

Tank Man, http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/behind-the-scenes-tank-man-of-tiananmen/

Death of Neda Agha-Solton, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Neda_Agha-Soltan

Kathy E. Gill

– http://faculty.washington.edu/kegill or @kegill– http://wiredpen.com/ and http://slideshare.net/kegill