I, for one, have gotten totally fed up with the complaints from mainstream journalists about how the newspaper industry is in a tailspin, in part because their business model is no longer working. One facet of this problem is that online classified advertising web sites like Craig's List are offering gratis what the newspapers provide for a fee. Another complaint is that the bloggers are "stealing" the journalists' good material. Also, bloggers are calling themselves "citizen journalists" but are not really card-carrying members of the fraternity.
Get over it! Times change. Business models become obsolete. The issue that now needs to be addressed is how the mainstream media is going to adapt to these new realities. Well, it appears that this may now be happening according to a recent article in the New York Times, which is the ubermeister of mainstream journalism (see: Mainstream News Outlets Start Linking to Other Sites). Below is an excerpt from this article with boldface emphasis mine:
Embracing the hyperlink ethos of the Web to a degree not seen before, news organizations are becoming more comfortable linking to competitors — acting in effect like aggregators. The Washington Post recently introduced a political Web site that recommends rival sites. This week NBC will begin introducing Web sites for its local TV stations with links to local newspapers, radio stations, online videos and other sources. And The New York Times will soon offer its online readers an alternative home page with links to competitors. These experiments exemplify “link journalism,” an idea that is gaining traction in other newsrooms across the country....For years, newspapers, television station Web sites and magazines have hesitated about linking to outside Web sites because, the logic goes, they want to keep the users on their own site. More internal page views and longer time-spent-viewing can equate to larger advertising revenue for Web sites. [However, it appears] that Google, the leading search engine, is a direct rebuttal to that logic....As simple as that sounds, [this new approach] represents an attitude shift. While linking to other sources is not a new occurrence by any means, it can still seem misguided to journalists who work vigorously to break a story ahead of other news outlets. [A newspaper spokesperson] believes the use of blogs by news organizations has helped newsroom managers accept that filtering the Web for visitors is a valuable editorial function. For bloggers, linking to original reporting, primary sources and discussions about stories is a form of etiquette, assigning credit to others who have written about a topic.
So, to put the matter bluntly, the mainstream media have now learned that it is efficient and cost-effective to link to web sites and bloggers in the same way that the bloggers and web sites have linked to their publications since the web was invented. This can be described as turnabout fair play and perhaps the salvation of the mainstream media. The journalists are also adopting the blogger's long standing etiquette of assigning credit to others who have written about a topic and are often know knowledgeable about it.
I have one other piece of advice to offer. With the exception of major newspapers like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, healthcare reporting on the web and in healthcare blogs is far superior to that which appears in most home-town newspapers. For health topics, such publications usually only reprint syndicated columns and articles anyway. If these home-town newspapers would begin to link to medical web sites and blogs, the quality of their medical offerings would increase immeasurably and their readers would respond by buying more newspapers. A start on a new business model.
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