Interesting piece and absolutely correct in that accountability for brands will be increasingly higher as the power of social media continues to grow.

However, I’m thinking of some of the bigger stories that are not so easy to find and even more difficult to report on- stories specifically about the government, or say industrial pollution controls that involve reams and reams of FOA requests and the cash to back them, and then paying people with the brains to sift and then report on the findings. While the EFF and NAACP have been bringing injustice to our attention, they are not quite the substitute that a media outlet is given the nature of the content creators- the EFF has an agenda, thus their works can not be read as anything resembling objective.

However, even though you didn’t say it outright in your post, I see your point that emerging media is still defining itself and the role that it plays.

Nice folio website, by the way. Wish it was around before I payed somebody else to develop mine. Maybe as the next marketing budget cycles around.

It’s not investigative journalism but it shows easy it is now to keep people in check.

Unfortunately, he is spot on with his observations about the industry. I have a certain level of optimism that it is not too late for all newspapers, but the bigger the paper, the harder and slower the transition to online content will be. What the industry is lacking is a leader with any sort of vision of the future, and time is running out.

Most newspapers are run by publishers who are answerable to corporations. These very very large companies are run by MBA’s who use the same business tactics that are used to run stamping plants and assembly lines- where people are replaceable overhead to be cut. Few if any of these organizations have any kind of visionary leadership or have done much of anything to embrace technology or the changing paradigm.

The question that is not being commonly asked is what this means for the fourth estate and how our country’s leadership will be held accountable once the newspapers are gone. There are few other organizations that will pay a team of people to spend months investigating Walter Reed hospital (although most newspapers have stopped serious investigative journalism) and fewer outlets that have such universal offline availability for those who can’t afford online content (cost of internet).

The death of newspapers is not just about jobs but about our political health as well. Is the internet ready and capable of replacing all that newspapers do (not just classifieds and fluff pieces)? And of course the bigger questions, are the up and coming content consumers interested in the bigger questions?

Just my point of view, always changeable and always looking for better information. And off topic.

http://poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=13570

http://www.suntimes.com/sports/deluca/1131768,CST-SPT-deluca28.article

“We wish Jay well and will miss him — not personally, of course — but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days.”

His argument that newspapers may not survive may be true, but coming from him it just seems like his usual whining. This guy thinks he will be successful out here in the wilderness of the internet? He will be eating cat food by the holidays.

Unfortunately, for as much hatred as he inspires and as much as people have been wanting him to leave the Sun-Times for years, his actual reasons for departure are dead-on.