AMERICAN newshounds are facing a media landscape that is changing at an unrelenting pace. Blogs and news websites are the ones now often cited as points of reference.
For instance, TMZ.com, which broke the story of Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rants during a drunk driving offence last year, has become a bible of sorts for entertainment reporters.
As Assoc Prof Sreenath Sreenivasan of Columbia University puts it, this celebrity gossip website was a “game-changer.”
“If you cover entertainment news, this is the place that you must turn to,” he said of the influential TMZ.com that, according to Nielsen/ NetRatings, had 7.9 million unique visitors in February. This marked a 151% increase over the previous year.
At a recent briefing for foreign journalists, Assoc Prof Sreenath named countless sites that had changed the name of the game.
“Five years ago, readers would tip off Fox or CNN,” he said, but now, exclusive photos of Britney Spears shaving her head was first released to X17 Online.
“I’m not saying that every blog is important. Hundreds of thousands of them are launched each day, most of them read by just the writer and his mother,” he said.
But there are those like “The Politico”, which began in January that had made its mark although its target is solely to report on Capitol Hill and the US presidential campaign.
Initiated by seasoned writers from The Washington Post, its site reportedly attracted one million page views on its first day.
It is a scene so different in certain regional newspapers, which have been reducing their manpower in Washington bureaus to focus on local stories in the wake of decreasing advertising revenue and declining readership.
To them, it is pointless to spend so much time and effort covering Washington events, which is available live to the public through other means.
The Newspaper Association of America has estimated that advertisement spending on newspaper websites will go up by 22% this year, unlike the mere 1.2% increase in their print editions.
One of the must-read blogs here is The Huffington Post, which draws 2.3 million unique visitors monthly, and whose creator Arianna Huffington was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 people who shaped the world last year, alongside Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report, another heavyweight blog.
Now, even some established newspapers are describing themselves as a “website first, newspaper second,” said Assoc Prof Sreenath.
Still, it is not the end of traditional journalism.
“It’s just that the delivery method is different, that’s all.”
And yes, old habits refuse to go away as people still read the papers even in the big cities.
However, a number of stories that appear in print are decidedly different in flavour now. They report on the latest website that offers seat reservations in the most popular restaurant in town, or the sites to check out if you want your home telephone number unreachable to telemarketers.
The New York Times has a column called “Online Shopper” where the writer would share her experience in buying a product on the Net.
Newspapers that did not think of ways to re-engage their readers might just end up becoming irrelevant, said Kelly McBride, a faculty member of Poynter Institute, a school for journalists.
In some markets where lay-offs took place, she said, newspaper companies began hiring employees with Internet skills.
“There is a demand to find new ways to deliver the news online,” she said in a recent telephone interview.
Newspapers are not dying but the newsroom is changing its face. As McBride puts it: “The train has left the station.”
