Internet Won't Kill TV

For someone like me who never really watched TV, I probably seem like the one person who should not comment on internet helping TV.  However from personal experience, I can see how internet has aided in boosting views for TV.  I spend a lot of time online.  Between Twitter and Facebook, I am always up-to-date on certain shows.  Sometimes I have to avoid being on the internet so the result of shows won't be spoiled for me.  As Rachel Velonza said in the New York Times article, “Even though knowing ahead spoils the program, you just can’t help but see for yourself what all these people are talking about."  Often times, these moments go viral, and continue to be watched months later.  Sometimes the internet makes me want to tune in to a show.  When all of your friends are spending time talking about one topic, I can't help but to watch even if I've never bothered to watch the show before. 

If you happen to miss something, YouTube is guaranteed to have it.  For example, I continued to see people talking about Charlie Sheen on Twitter and Facebook.  I was totally confused.  A simple search in Google brought me to his in-home interview posted on YouTube.  I also missed Chris Brown's live interview on Good Morning America yesterday, but I didn't miss the opportunity to view the clip.

Therefore, I must agree with the New York Times article that the internet can be TV's friend.  "The Nielsen Company, which measures television viewership and Web traffic, noticed this month that one in seven people who were watching the Super Bowl and the Olympics opening ceremony were surfing the Web at the same time."  Most importantly, internet has helped to somewhat make TV what it used to be when families all gathered around to watch a show together.  The difference now is that the family is spread all around the world, but everyone can still converse about the same thing.  "If viewers cannot be in the same room, the next best thing is a chat room or something like it."

On the other end, there is worry about Hulu and YouTube taking away viewers from TV.  I have to disagree.  There are some things that are just better viewed on TV, and there are some people (older generations) who just won't get into using the internet.

Internet Takes Away from TV or Helps It?

Is the internet going to replace television one day? Will people flock to their computers to catch their favorite shows every week? At one point this is the way we thought that the world was going to turn to and the television would slowly become a thing of the past. This idea has gone in a completely different way though. The internet has worked to make TV even more than it was before. Thanks to all the social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, advertising for events has increased on the internet which leads to a larger amount of people watching the events on TV. People also seem to use the internet as they watch different events to converse with friends or to tweet about them. From our reading we saw that one in seven people were on the internet during this years Superbowl. I can say that I was one of those people and was also part of those that was constantly posting my thoughts on the game and the commercials on Facebook as they happened.

I think that the internet has also helped television by being able to catch up with past shows. This allows the viewer to stay on track with shows that they missed so that in the upcoming week they are able to watch their show at the scheduled time and raise the viewing audience of the show.

Changing Times: How the Internet Will Help the Newspaper Industry



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Okay, so we, as Humans, are not so great with change.  Most of the time, it takes a looooooong time for change to come about.  Whether the change is societal, institutional, technological etc., we don't generally like change and we need a lot of convincing that the change is good for us, at least for the most part, in order for us to go along with it. (I remember when DVDs first came out and I thought they were ridiculous...true story.)  For this week's blog, I would like to focus primarily on a technological change that we are learning about this week: How the Internet is changing Journalism.  Specifically, I want to focus on the impact of the Web on print Newspapers.

What makes this agent of change, in this case I mean the Internet, different than most is the speed at which it facilitates change.  Technology is advancing at light speed and we are struggling to adapt to it.  The newspaper arena is a classic example of this.  Clay Shirky in his blog, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, suggests that the increased incorporation of news media from print to web is a "revolution" of sorts, similar to that of the invention of the printing press in the 1500's.  The Internet, much like the printing press of the 1500's, vastly altered the number of people who have access to news and other information.  The difference is that the Internet "revolution" allows information to be shared almost instantaneously and much more efficiently, allowing widespread change to happen almost overnight.  Shirky mentions that "Web use is a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world," so it only makes sense for newspapers to adapt to these changing times.  Shirky also explains that with the Internet, "the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public has stopped being a problem." 

So what is the problem then?  Why are we hearing horror stories of newspaper companies all over the nation going out of business by the hundreds?  Well, I think that the problem is drastically overstated but also that some newspaper companies are not adapting quickly enough to the rest of society.  Rick Edmonds notes in The News Media: An Annual Report on Journalism that "newspapers are not dying off in droves, only a half a dozen of any size went out of business" but he also warns that "far too many American papers are at risk of becoming insubstantial."  People want to be able to access their news at any time of day, from any location, on their cell phones, laptops and iPads, instead of paying for a bulky print newspaper.  Edmonds points out that "online sites of newspapers continued to add audience..and have become the locus of breaking news and offering web-native features like blogs, discussion chains and video."  This, to me, suggests that newspaper companies can survive in today's fast paced world just by paying attention to what their techno-savvy consumers want and then finding a way to give it to them-and it would seem that the Internet is just the tool for the job.

The Death Of Traditional Media

     It is not necessary to sugar coat or beat around the bush regarding this topic, but the Internet is killing traditional media!  If you can’t see this then I am afraid you are literally blind.

     First, let’s look at the progression of the amateur journalist and breaking news.  Cell phones, portable video cameras, and YouTube have made the average person a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize.  The earliest examples take us back to 911.  The earliest footage (plane crashing into the World Trade Center, and over all destruction) were from regular citizens.  Whether this media was from a cell phone, or video cameras they were first.  In fact, major TV News outlets broadcast this amateur video, because at that point they had little live, compelling footage.

     Second, we should fast-forward to present day, and how the Internet will affect broadcast news.  Let’s look at Henry Blodget’s model for the original ideas presented through television.

• Not much else to do at home that's as simple and fun as TV
• No way to get video content other than via TV
• No options other than TV for advertisers who want to tell video stories
• No options other than cable--and, more recently, satellite--to get TV
• Tight choke-points in each market through which all video content has to flow (cable company, airwaves), which creates enormous value for the owners of those gates.

This seems very primitive compared to the advancement in technologies, and the rise of the amateur journalist.  Not much to do at home that’s as simple and fun as TV?  As Blodget mentions we now have the Internet!  No way to get video other than TV?  Youtube, every major news website, and well again the Internet!  No options other than TV for advertisers?  Can you say Fire Fox Ad Blocker? 

     Listen to my warning, TV news is on its way out, and here’s why.  Remember a month ago the incident with the bomb in the airport?  There was cell phone footage on the Internet within minutes of the explosion!  Sure the video was subpar quality, but the fact that technology allows for this is amazing.  Where was Anderson Cooper?  Where was any reporter that CNN, or FOX News had set up in that area in case anything happened?  Oh yes, they simply were not there, or arrived long after this amateur footage made its circulation.  Listen to your humble narrator when I say that broadcast news is going the way of Old Yeller.  Now anyone with a cell phone and an Internet connection can be a version of Walter Kronkite! 

Shift from Paper to Tablet, Publisher to Aggregator

Having delivered the Ann Arbor News on Sundays and Mondays back in early 2009 (temporary job), I saw first hand the decline in subscriptions and remember getting spreadsheets every week detailing the growing number of lost customers that I had to stop delivering to. Listening to NPR on the six hour rural (dirt road) route, I recall one day hearing a story about the rapid decline in newspaper subscribers nationally and thinking that I was seeing the last wave roll into shore. Listening to the other drivers, some that had clearly been delivering for well over a decade, I combined the multiple sections of the paper and bagged them while standing outside the loading docks in the sub-freezing temperatures. The rumors were all grim, sure enough, just a month after quitting the job the Ann Arbor News announced that they were shutting down for good. The spin-off web based paper, annarbor.com, was where only a small portion of the Ann Arbor News writing staff found employment.

Blogger Clay Shirky explains that, "During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points." There have been many experimental news sites in recent years, Digg comes to mind as a major turning point in the way news is shared. Content aggregators such as Reddit and Digg will replace large news publishers (The New York Times, The L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, etc). As Clay Shirky stated in a blog post, "Printing presses are terrifically expensive to set up and to run." With the death of the printed newspaper, comes the enhanced tablet version that will fill the need for a more economic content distribution system. As companies like Digg rush to be the new go-to distribution source, traditional newspaper companies will maintain their presence with virtual versions for devices such as the iPad. NewsCorp just launched The Daily tablet based newspaper, while other companies are right around the corner from creating tablet optimized (interactive) versions. The pay-wall will eventually kill most of these attempts at creating a next generation newspaper.

Digg has already made the transition by offering the option of becoming a preferred content provider. After signing a contract, a preferred content provider receives better ranking (placement) in the news stream. Freelance writers will likely pool together to create small companies that enter agreements (trusted/preferred content providers) with large content aggregators like Digg and Reddit. Instead of routing users to an external website for the news story, preferred content provider submitted stories will instantly appear on the aggregator's site. This will provide a more consistent experience, helping solve the issue of simplicity that still keeps some people from ditching the traditional newspaper. The aggregator will pay preferred content providers using the ad-based revenue. Local newspapers will shift to a smaller staffed web-based version, just like the Ann Arbor News did.

I have a boombox in one hand and the sports section in the other.

When I was in third grade and at the height of the Bad Boy era of the Detroit Pistons era, my older brother would read the sports section and I would read it during breakfast. In sixth grade when the Wings starting winning and going to the playoffs on a regular basis, it would be myself and my younger brother fighting for the sports section. The newspaper would come 8am each day and my mother would have it on the table when we got home from school. I thank my parents for that as I read the newspaper and my pursuit of journalism and the fine print continues.

The internet blindsided the newspapers. It is that simple. I write for Patch.com as a freelance writer. I write for a online publication which was 2o years ago your local newspaper. It is the fault of the newspapers for not adjusting to the internet. The internet took the newspapers and made it localized and made the information so instant. Right now as I write this blog, The Birmingham Patch Twitter is updating Country Day winning in basketball. How cool is that? To know how your high school is doing in a basketball game you cant attend while your sitting at home doing homework or serving dinner.

What you know about the newspaper as you grew up is gone. Every major publication still prints but guess where most of the ad dollars are going ? That's right on the net. Blogs are being sponsored. Most ads are on the net. New ways of writing are popping up every day. Granted, the News and Free Press writers are taking a hit in their salaries and some of the writing has suffered as the writers leave to start up sites like..Patch.com and Mlive. I think this will expand journalism and make us aware that when changes are coming, to change with them or get left behind.

Save the Newspaper

Not sure about you, but there is nothing better than getting the newspaper or a book, a great cup of coffee and sitting out on the deck, by the water or on your front porch in the spring time just reading. Don't get me wrong I love the internet with everything you can research, read, and just find that is unusual. But it is a different type of satisfaction, with the newspaper you just don't have to worry about the battery dying, is there a plug nearby, and can just freely move about without the concern is my laptop going to get damaged.

As noted in Journalism.org "But far too many American papers are at risk of becoming insubstantial. They lack the heft to be thrown up the front porch or to satisfy those readers still willing to pay for a good print newspaper. Are you willing to pay for a good printed newspaper? Do you choose to get your news on the internet? Or both?

Quoted from the attached link the Death of the Newspaper: When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place.