I cannot disagree more with this statement from Steve Rubel regarding blogging and news media outlets:
It [Blogging] unshackles reporters from just delivering facts. They can now show who they are as people through the expression of opinions.
IMHO a couple of reasons news readership has declined
#1 The facts or the lack of it in today’s reporting
#2 The lack of distribution channels (or rather sticking to the tried and true closed distribution channel)
Steve addresses #2 and I find nothing to disagree with there:
For newspapers to survive, they need to turn themselves into an online and offline platform for local readers
But without the fact-based, honest, and newsworthy journalism all of the below won’t matter one bit:
What I am saying is that local newspapers need to use their brands and their big web sites to help local readers profit emotionally and monetarily by: selling goods peer-to-peer, expressing themselves, developing new kinds of technologies, connecting through online and offline local social networking and more.
In fact, by not sticking to #1 and turning to churlish, sometimes outright unethical and dishonest, and “soft-news”, newspapers (and most media outlets for that matter) have lost their brand (and subsequently their profits).
The web is a compendium of opinionated expressions (no need to look further than this site) and users are devouring it (maybe not through this site) but, again, IMHO, that is not users want from a news-related site. I think they expect, you know, news. How they distribute it – via blogs, rss, Timesreader etc. is important but not as important as #1. But that’s is just my opinion.
