Another Dinosaur Down

November 6, 2007 on 8:51 am | In Blogs, Journalism, Media, Newspapers, Online | 2 Comments

WebProNews has an interesting article this week about the impending death of Associated Press, killed by blogs and aggregators. Author Rich Ord contends that,

Blogs are the new “AP” journalists and aggregation services which started with NewsLinx.com in 1996 (founded by me!) and which now include Google News, Topix, Techmeme, WebProWire and the new Blogrunner have made the AP much less relevant. There are now tens of thousands of bloggers around the world providing coverage and analysis of current events too! It comes down to why pay when you can get the news for free.

Just part of the reason, I say. Old-line media is arrogant. Its “smarter than you” mentality grates on news consumers. Additionally, the mainstream media wants to be a “proprietary” system when consumers want “open source.” Finally, old line media have lost reader trust because of coverage like this.

Other Posts Of Interest

  • http://www.getsocialpr.com/ Rodger D. Johnson

    Aggregators displacing big news bureaus are similar to the same shifts we’ve seen in other technology. We thought television would kill the radio; yet we still have radios – I listened to NPR on one this morning. I guess that’s the classic example to make my point.

    But there’s a larger, more immediate issue raised by linking to a neo-con blog. While blogger Ken Shepherd laments the “liberal” bias of mainstream media, he in fact invokes a classic neo-con ideology. His post bashes the First Amendment right afforded to the Associated Press reporter – that same right Shepherd uses to write his post.

    While his points to the bias of the AP reporter, he is also being bias. In both cases, this is classic bad journalism. What new facts has Shepherd contributed to the story? The answer – none! Executing a Red Herring, typical of the Republic noise machine, is his only success.

  • http://www.my-creativeteam.com Harry Hoover

    Rodger, the point is that reporters hide behind a veneer of objectivity. Since I was a reporter 30 years ago, I’ve seen journalism become more and more editorial and less objective. I think many consumers feel the same way and because of it have lost trust in this channel.

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