It's a simple truth that the vast majority of blog posts such as this one draw on existing news stories and then build on them in some fashion. Hence the statistic from the Pew Research Center that 95% of stories with 'new information' originate from the traditional media, particularly newspapers.
Conducted in the Baltimore Maryland area, researchers found that 83% of stories were 'repetitive', with the other 17% that were new coming almost exclusively from what's termed traditional media. General interest newspapers were responsible for 48% of 'new news', specialist titles generated 13%, TV in the Baltimore area was responsible for 28% of new content, while new media only generated 4%.
It's a fair point: Our society depends on organisations who have the resources and professionalism to delve into and uncover the stories we all need to know about. Very few people who work in the digital media space would argue otherwise. Instead in response to this research I'd say:
For non professional and online media outlets to break almost 1 in 20 news stories is quite high. And there have been some major ones - for example, here and here
Even if social media doesn't break news, it does have a role in moving it along and magnifying it considerably. For example, look at what happened to Eurostar (the train service between London and Paris / Brussels) before Christmas
No one realistically thinks social media will ever replace traditional news gathering outlets, whether they publish in print or online. But it is a game changer, and the organisations themselves seem to think so as evidenced by Sky News installing Tweetdeck across journalists' computers.
Social engineering doomed to fail?
One thing that I do question is social engineering to 'make' people read newspapers. True, giving 18 year olds free (print) subscriptions has had some impact in France, but I wonder how successful these sorts of schemes will be long-term.
Paid Content has an article about the (opposition) Labour culture spokesperson in Scotland, Pauline McNeill advocating a similar scheme North of the border.
The article also includes some stats about the mountain Scottish newspapers face, with 'The Scotsman', the paper that holds itself up as Scotland's national quality paper, seeing a circulation drop from 75,402 to a pretty shocking 46,300 since 2002, and The Daily Record (the main tabloid), dropping from 626,646 to 323,01 in the same period.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Newspapers and Traditional Media Still Produce Most News (marketingpilgrim.com)