New Media Prof Blog

Traditional Media

Posted on 26. Feb, 2009 by admin in For Students, New Media

It had been a bad week for newspapers. It didn’t happen just this week and it didn’t happen overnight, but the headlines in some of the major papers about themselves tell the story. Denver’s Rocky Mountain News is publishing the final edition. The San Francisco Chronicle in a last gasp. The Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Enquirer and even the New York Times are in trouble. This is my worry: where will we get a credible reporting of the news in these corners of America? Now I never worked in the newpaper business, but I did work in the TV News industry for almost 20 years and as a former journalist, I worry that we are losing something very valuable – something at the core of our 1st Amendment. In business school, we called this a ‘paradigm.’ Why the newspapers and TV News organizations didn’t see it coming, I do not know. Some of us did raise flags, and tried to integrate new media with traditional media, but no one was listening. New Media was coming. (It actually was there for early adopters in the late ’90’s) Now it is here in critical mass. Even top TV Network execs are calling out for change now as survivalists. TV News Must Embrace New Media…read more in the Miami Herald.  Hopefully it is not too late for the transformation and integration of the traditional media values to a new media delivery. And hopefully, we can preserve the core of what made news organizations in the country great – the basics like fact-checking, two-source rule, attribution, accurate quotes, investigation and reporting both sides of the story. That’s the real story.

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Tags: 1st amendment, New Media, newspapers