Category: Internet and web

New vs. traditional media: Whom do you trust?

When it comes to breaking news, most Americans trust the old media sources (newpapers, radio and television) over the new media (blogs, podcasts and the like). But new media may be catching up.

That’s according to a LexisNexis survey of American attitudes toward different media sources.

As reported more than a week ago by TechWeb, “About 25 percent would turn to print and broadcast media Internet sites” to get breaking news, while only 6 percent “would seek information from Internet user groups, blogs and chat rooms.”

But the survey noted a trend toward relying on a mix of new and traditional media:

Some 52 percent of consumers said they believe they will continue to place the most trust and reliance in traditional news sources, but 35 percent expected to primarily trust and rely on emerging media (Internet pundits, citizen journalists and bloggers) in the future. Thirteen percent anticipated trusting and relying mostly on emerging media.

Blogs, user groups and chat rooms ranked second, behind traditional lifestyle magazines for entertainment, which ranked first among news topics of interest.

And blogs like this one, which report news like this 11 days after both the mainstream and new media, are not trustworthy sources for breaking news. (By the way, did you hear that North Korea might have tested a nuclear bomb a couple of days ago?)

Coming to terms with the ‘media tree’

Bob LeDrew of FlackLife makes some interesting observations on the state of traditional news media in his riff on this “growing media tree” post from Mike’s Points. (“Growing media tree” is Mike’s collective term to describe the blogosphere and other sundry social networks that, by virtue of the Internet’s interconnectedness, have grafted themselves into the traditional news media sphere.) Both bloggers join in the hand-wringing about the fate of traditional journalism in the new mediasphere and the mainstream media’s seeming inability to find a viable economic model in this online arena. Mike lists all sorts of questions for the blogosphere to address, while Bob homes in on Mike’s first point:

Why can’t traditional media — print media — find out how to make more money from the valuable services they provide?

That’s the point upon which the rest of the questions hinge. If the media can’t make money, then they can’t afford to operate. Here’s Bob’s response:

They are trying, but they’re being faced with challenges they haven’t seen before. I think that the nimbleness of the blogosphere, what Ian Ketcheson calls the “self-organizing” nature, is allowing people to get so much information so quickly that ‘old media’ are missing out on not only the old revenue models, but that they’re missing NEW revenue models.

I happened to re-read a mid-90s book called The next 20 years of your life this week. The author, futurist Richard Worzel, has lots of interesting thoughts, even if they’re nine years old. And while some of what he envisions has either not come to pass or is going to take a lot longer to happen than his ‘event horizon’ of 2017, I think one of his more intriguing ideas was one of “news agents.” The idea essentially is that in the future, you would have a “genie” that would create an individually tailored “newscast” that would also be able to call up more depth on any story that caught your eye, from magazine coverage to online chats to opening up one-on-one dialogues, all of which would cost in the cents rather than the dollars that an Infomart or similar search would cost you now.

We have those news agents now. They’re called RSS feeds. But we still have to program those agents.