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My Red Herring piece today follows up on Jay Rosen’s Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. Excerpt:
Bloggers are beating the crap out of journalists, because bloggers are giving away what writers used to be paid to produce. That doesn’t mean bloggers are going to win the market, because there have been plenty of industries assailed by the price-busting assault of massive commoditization. It does mean that journalists—all writers—are being pressed to come up with new and better ways to get their work into the market. It means that the centers of mass media distribution are melting like centrally heated igloos—the infrastructures are simply too big.
Blogging is out and out competition for people’s attention that the established media have never experienced before. Every prior revolution in media has required a relatively massive investment in production and distribution that is simply nonexistent, so what compels a writer, musician, or producer to work for a company in order to reach an audience of 500,000 or a million people (or, even, 90,000 local readers)?
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