The Internet surpassed radio as a source for political news in the United States last year as more people went online to keep up with the presidential election campaign. So says a new report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Twenty-nine percent of U.S. adults used the Internet to get political news last year, up from 4 percent in 1996 and 18 percent in 2000. Television remained the dominant medium for most voters, but 18 percent said they got most of their political news from the Internet, compared with 17 percent who said they turned to the radio for their news.
Category Archives: Journalism
Blogging, journalism and democracy
“The technology — that is, the software is democratic in and of itself. What were witnessing is a shift of power and prestige. Journalists have been accustomed to being powerful. Most people don’t like giving up power. It used to be cool and MEAN SOMETHING to be The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or NBC or CBS or CNN … now it means less and less.”
FarmPolicy.com
Keith Good solves the “not enough hours in the day to blog” problem by getting up at 4:00 a.m. I talked to him this morning (10 min) about his blog, FarmPolicy.com, which deals with U. S. agriculture policy. A really good example of the kind of citizen journalism (or publishing, if you prefer) that’s transforming and challenging mainstream media.
New news network?
“As the network anchors drummed their manicured fingers, waiting for correspondents to parachute into position, the sketchy wire reports were supplanted by real-life, as-it-was-happening stories by bloggers who penned moving first-person accounts. This is as real-time as news can get. Weblogs, which started out as online diaries, have morphed into reporters’ notebooks. The information is raw — and perhaps unpolished when compared with news from more established outlets — but it is nonetheless news.”
— Article at Business 2.0
“Now the news waits for us to go get it”
“The idea that we should just sit there and watch as someone reads the news to us is — now that we see the alternatives — quaint at best, condescending at worst. Why the hell should we ever have let Dan Rather decide what’s important to us and how we should should look at it? How did we ever tolerate listening to the news from him without taking the opportunity to talk back?”
“It’s the top-down, one-way, one-size-fits-all news-extruding machine that’s ready for the mothballs. It’s the old view of delivering the news that’s antiquated. We no longer wait for the news to come to us; now the news waits for us to go get it. We are in control.”
Jeff Jarvis on the death of the Dan Rathers of news… what should rise in their place.