Day notes that although some blogs can be a valuable addition to social discourse, most function much like letters to the editor did in previous decades. He points out that an editorial in The Australian previously ‘observed that blogging had all the intellectual value of graffiti on a toilet door.’ Hmmm… makes me wonder about all the hours I’ve spent on my little blog.
However, I never intended this page to be a substitute for a newspaper and that is exactly Day’s point. Although blogging can add a new element to the media landscape, it is unable to replace the high quality investigative reporting that a newspaper can offer. By demanding this level of journalism and combining news across print and online platforms, the public will receive better news, more easily. Unfortunately, ‘so far there is no effective measures that combine print and web readerships’ and ‘it costs a lot more today to reach eyeballs in print than it does online.’Day admits that eventually newspapers may cease to exist in a hardcopy form, but that until then there is still a market, however small, for the traditional delivery of news.
The issues here appear to be about quality, cost and effective saturation of the market. Like Day, I have no magic answers, but believe the industry will continue to learn as it develops. At the end of the day, the way we produce and consume the news is evolving and in ten years time the media landscape will look quite different than it does today. The idea of combining the advantages of both mediums to work together appeals most to me. What we need now is an effective and quantifiable means of doing so.
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