Journalism was born out of intellectual curiosity and maintained by intellectual laziness. When Johann Carolus gave us what we understand today as the first printed newspaper he did so to provide a way to disseminate knowledge rapidly, asynchronously and persistently. It allowed a small group of authors to rapidly distribute information they thought everyone should know about with a strong emphasis on the timeliness and temporality of said information.
This is the same story for the modern web - except that small group is now a single person and that “everybody” is no longer figurative. Many people have said that the web is an enabling technology as profound as Gutenberg’s printing press. The printing press, like the web, was initially considered a novelty and didn’t really find its legs until its net effect had taken hold - mass literacy. When everybody knew how to read, books became the primary mechanism of information transfer. Marshal McLuhan posited this lead to a monopoly of the alphabet - where the letter supplanted the spoken-word as the primary communicator.
Journalism, that is the process of compiling information and articulating it for a community of consumers, before Walter Lippman and John Dewey had their say, was simply about communicating facts to a group of people.
Journalism has become, however, a method of maintaining the appearance of worldliness at a convenience. It took the rigor and difficulty out of information and allowed people to understand and contextualize events - to read the immediate unfolding of current-events like a history book.
Without getting overly Marxist all up-ins “the media,” that is the media-industry and its social-class corollary quickly dismantled the necessity for people to think critically. The media classified their audience into aggregations of mutually compatible opinion groups and delivered material to reinforce these classification schemes. It takes a scintilla of factual truth, usually isolated and frequently uncontroversial - and places it in a contrived context to reinforce predetermined political, social or preferential biases (which exist as a synthesis of the political agenda of media corporations and the demand of their consumers).
Newspapers cling, to this day, to a laughable pretense of objectivity. An historical absurdity which has been dismantled, in drastically different ways from people as diverse as Noam Chomsky and Joseph Goebbels. To deem centralized institutional media as any sort of arbiter of fact, truth, reality or correctness is patently fatuous.
People like Andrew Keen cling to an archaic method of imperative reality - it’s true because we (the elite) say it is true. This was, for almost two millenia, an efficient and effective way of establishing a consensus - everyone was on the same page when it came to how the world worked because we all listened to the same people. If we didn’t, we went to war with each other.
The internet, and specifically the web, and the kind of social perception it engenders, greases the wheels for consensus reality. The “web-generation” isn’t called that simply because of the technology we’re using (that is a mulligan in the generational narrative).
People who use the web view society differently from those who do not, dramatically differently. Self-identification and mutual discoverability, which is taken to new extremes on the web, enables a fundamentally different kind of social interaction and self-perception.
Think about the differences in the interpretation of such concepts as “community”, “like-minded”, “friend”, “dialogue”, “openness” that the web has and can enable - this kind of change in perspective is irrevocable once it has transpired, when one “gets” the web one can never go back.
What we can consider fact, or true or even believable has been undermined by instantaneous transfer of information. Nobody can be considered canonical, if Wikipedia (edited by tens of thousands of dedicated supporters bent on veracity) is unreliable then so is everything else.
What newspapers rely on now to justify their existence, are the Aristotlean “incidental” qualities. Those things which are consequential of newspapers qua newspapers but aren’t definitional. They are large format, consume no electricity to read, portable, amenable to advertising placements and consequently (for some) quite lucrative.
Yomiuri Shimbun retains the highest circulation of a daily, paid-for newspaper in the world. Its Alexa rank is 735. The highest Alexa rank for a newspaper website is 91, retained by the New York Times. One must go well below the ranks of all the major social networks, and most of the big-name blog hosts (Wordpress, Blogger, Blogspot and Livejournal) to get to NYT. Wikipedia, is however, ranked 8th by Alexa - an Amazon property dedicated to tracking the relative popularity of websites.
If the New York Times really does give us all the news that fit to print (newspapers have condescension integrated even into their mottos), why then does NYT get two-thirds the traffic of CNN.com? Surely the world demands the rigour, expertise wisdom and insight proffered by the editorial staff of the NYT and newspapers of its ilk. Americans have used the TV as their primary source of news since 1963, the glitz and multimedia nature were used to explain the appeal. On the web, no distinction necessarily applies.
Perhaps, however, the world is getting messier. Perhaps there is an awakening of the fallibility of expert opinion (that is, in the case of mass-media opinion provided by a purported expert).
The mythology was the journalist was the citizen-ally against the potential corruption of our ruling elite, then it became our surrogate watch-dogs against our democratic leaders. They were, the story goes, an essential pillar in maintaining the most important (and only essential) element of good politics - transparency.
Now, thanks to Chomsky and others, they are regarded merely as one more vested group. Owned as they are by large, vertically integrated corporations with extensive integration within government and private business. Media institutions are not our friends.
The principle threat is not from the blogosphere, mass-media is being eroded by newspapers themselves who’ve lost their way, their purpose and ultimately their reason for being.
Newspapers are made of dead tree. They’re falling without making a sound.