"Oldpapers" and digging journalism

I know this isn't really new stuff but I've been thinking about this for a while so thought I'd put pen to paper or maybe I should say fingers to keyboard, rather. Which is exactly what I've been thinking about, the problem that "old" media is facing.

I listened to a program on the radio about this a few weeks back and they mentioned an old teacher of mine when they spoke about the start of newspapers online in Sweden. His name is Mark Comerford and he was involved with starting up one of the more successful online newssites in Sweden, aftonbladet.se. The point of the radio show was that the problem newspapers face today is that they are expected to have an online version of their newspaper that should update almost hourly 24/7 but at the same time people in general don't want to buy newspapers. A newspaper in the southern part of Sweden (sorry I forget what it's called) even tried giving away newspapers to everybody between 25 and 35 but not even then did people want the newspapers. Personally I can fully understand it, being just under 35 myself and having no interest what so ever in a paper newspaper every morning. The problem the newspapers face is of course that the online versions doesn't come near the revenue levels of the paper version.

So the problem here is that nobody wants to pay for the news but we still want quality newsdistribution. Today we talk a lot about the power of the new media with blogging and all kinds of social networking tools and while these things are great when it comes to getting news about what is happening in countries like Iran, Honduras, China, etc but the problem with all these new tools is that the content in them are mostly produced by amateurs. So while yes it's good that we get news at all from places like the above but on the other hand should we really trust the news we get that way? And even though we might trust it one would at least expect it to be poorly written and not all that interesting to read and quite possibly also heavily biased.

The huge plus side of the old media industry such as our national newspapers is that they can afford (at least so far) to employ well educated people that can grasp the broader points of a specific aspect and then explain it in a well written and interesting way. At least that's one of the main reasons I still occasionally read newspapers but also the reason I watch TV shows with digging journalism and listen to these debate shows on the radio every now and then. Because I enjoy good journalism and news reported by somebody that knows what they are talking about.

Good journalism also makes it easier for me to take a piece of news and read, listen and watch it from several different sides through different kinds of media and from different political viewpoints depending on the journalist. If a piece of news is only reported by amateurs then the news might not even be recognizable when you go to a different source.

Many newspapers and similar news reporting companies around the (western) world speak about this problem right now and while I don't have a solution for the problem I do think it's slightly scary that all the news we consume in the future could be like the news we read in Aftonbladet (see above) or watch on CNN.