It's been about 20 years since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web on the back of the Internet. For more than a billion people on the planet, the Web today is an alternate, digital universe that is gradually overtaking the analog, physical world as a source of information and connections.
Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press conducted a survey that rendered two obvious conclusions: the Internet has overtaken newspapers as a source of national and international news, and television, led by CNN, continues to serve as the main source.
(Credit:
Pew Research Center)
According to the Pew survey, 40 percent of respondents (versus 24 percent in 2007) said the Internet is their primary source for national and international news. That compares with 35 percent (versus 34 percent 2007) who rely on newspapers and 70 percent (versus 74 percent in 2007) who use television as their main source. Given the historic presidential campaign and economic woes this year, the large percentage increase year-over-year for the Internet is not surprising.
Among Americans under 30, 59 percent (versus 34 percent in 2007) said they get most of their national and international news from the Internet. Television tied with the Internet at 59 percent for that group, but that was a decline from 68 percent in 2007. (The figures add up to more 100 percent, by the way, because people could offer multiple answers.)
Television and printed newspapers are clearly stressed by financial pressures, which have been amplified by the ailing economy. While some of the newspapers have leading Web sites, their financial staple--classifieds and job and real estate listings--has been dominated by independent Internet services such as Craigslist, Monster.com, and Redfin. Mainstream television is competing with the likes of YouTube for eyeballs and is still trying to figure out how to swim with the Internet fishes and generate revenue, which at this point is a rounding error.
Most newspapers have figured out that you create content for the Web first and that the print edition is a byproduct of that output. Television programming can be viewed on a TV, PC, smartphone, or digital billboard. But as NBC's Jeff Zucker said recently, "People had been counting on digital exposure. I had been trying to talk about the fact that even as it grew, it was not necessarily the big growth engine for legacy media companies that were trading those analog dollars for digital dimes. We're now up to dimes. That's an improvement. It's still not a dollar for a dime kind of business that I would like to be in."
While the Internet is growing as the place where people go for news, the revenue simply isn't catching up fast enough. The less obvious part of the Internet overtaking newspapers as the main source for national and international news is that much of the seed content--the original reporting that breaks national and international news and is subsequently refactored by legions of bloggers--comes from the reporters and editors working at the financially strapped newspapers and national and local television outlets.
Memeorandum aggregates and ranks content from leading media outlets and blogs covering politics.
(Credit: Memeorandum )New publishing entities, such as Politico, the nonprofit ProPublica, the Huffington Post, and numerous blogs are making original contributions to national and international news, and some are trying to make money while they're at it.
As the financial pressures mount--the outlook for 2009 is dismal--and the cost cutting continues, we can only hope that the original news reporting by top-flight journalists is not a major casualty.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt
(Credit: Dan Farber)According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the Internet is a "cesspool" where false information thrives. As reported by AdAge, Schmidt was addressing his remarks to magazine executives who were on a pilgrimage to the Googleplex.
The cesspool is one of the byproducts of the Internet. With no barriers to entry and nearly frictionless production and distribution, it's easy for false information, lies, doctored images, and other forms of deception to infiltrate the Internet. Web crawlers aren't particularly good at making judgments about the truthiness of digital matter, and the wisdom of the crowd can't keep up with the river of data streaming online.
Schmidt gave the magazine publishers hope for their future. Brands, he said, are the way to rise above the cesspool, and of course he is right. The corollary is that advertising via Google and its brethren is an essential way to build and sustain a brand.
But brands, even those with long, venerable histories and massive ad budgets, can be decimated as we have seen over the last decade and in the current economic nuclear winter, with banks, automakers, publishers, and retailers fading away.
Offline revenues, especially for newspapers, have been in steady decline, and online revenues are not making up the difference. As a result, there is less editorial investment from so-called mainstream media in the primary and investigative reporting that is often fodder for blogger refactoring. But the blogosphere and newer online publishing entities, such as GigaOm, Politico, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, and VentureBeat, are bringing new, or at least alternative, voices into the mix, contributing far more to the good side than to the cesspool.
Schmidt and the magazine publishers reportedly expressed concern about the cost and quantity of what high-value (exemplary journalism) content. "Narrative sustains the [media] business...but the future of high-quality journalism is a huge problem. A reasonable prediction is that there will be fewer voices. More money is needed to fund high-quality work," Schmidt said as reported by the Huffington Post. With a major economic contraction underway, funding high-quality work will become even more difficult.
Relying solely on advertising revenues hasn't proven to be a winning strategy for most publishers. Unfortunately, Web users come from a place in which paying for content is not part of the culture. If people are willing to pay $4.99 for six hamburger buns or $3.50 for a simple cup of coffee, why aren't they willing to pay for content they value? One can only assume that people are willing to settle for content of generally less value that is free of charge--or that hamburger buns are more essential to life than a good, well-researched story.
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