Digital Diary

Jed Murphy - Carlson Marketing

Seth Godin recently predicted that by 2012 "there will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US".

Now whilst that may be sensationalistic in terms of timescale - there is no doubt that the newspaper industry is in trouble. In the six months to March of this year the decline in US newspaper weekday circulation almost doubled (Source: Bloomberg) and a number of historic US newspaper titles have already hit financial trouble.

Yes the recession has hit media spend - but the core issue is that more & more consumers are getting their news from the internet.

But that's not really new news. What is new is how the internet is increasingly becoming the source for breaking news.

Last Thursday night I was doing some things around the house with BBC News 24 on in the background. But rather than seeing a journalist on the screen - there was a caption with an image of the TMZ.com site leading with the news of Michael Jackson's death. For the next couple of hours the BBC's news was simply reporting on the news from TMZ and the LA Times. Mainstream news media reporting breaking internet news.

In September last year, Robert Peston chose his blog to announce the proposed Lloyds/HBOS merger before breaking the news on BBC.

More recently, with reporting restrictions in place, the news from Iran has been lead by blogs, Tweets and videos from people on the streets.

In a 24-hour global news cycle no single news organisation is going to have the coverage to capture every breaking news story. So thanks to Twitter, blogs & the camera-phone the power of the consumer-journalist is massive. News can be broken by anywhere, anywhere, at any time.

Social media is increasingly driving the news agenda.

The challenge for the established media therefore becomes two-fold:

• How do they drive revenue from their online properties,
  
• How do they continue to verify the myriad of consumer-journalist sources?