After a spate of closures and layoffs in the latter part of the last decade, the newspaper industry appeared to find its footing over the past few years. But now that oasis of stability may be drying up.

Hard times are hitting some of the most resilient titles, and the trend indicates that things are only get worse. The decline in print advertising revenue at The New York Times has accelerated from 9 percent in the first quarter of 2016 to nearly 19 percent in the most recent quarter, writes Mathew Ingram in a Fortune story ominously headlined “The New York Times Scrambles to Avoid Print Advertising Cliff.” In announcing its financial results, the paper said it expects the falloff to continue “at a rate similar to that seen in the third quarter,” or at least 19% per quarter.

The only good news in that statement is that sequential 20% declines take a smaller total dollar bite out of revenues with each iteration because the base number is smaller. But that’s the only good news. If the last three quarters are any indication, the Times advertising business is in free-fall. The paper has done a better job than anyone of growing its base of circulation revenue and increasing its digital advertising business, but both pale in comparison to the size – and profitability – of the print advertising business.

Almost in tandem with the Times’ disappointing financial results, The Wall Street Journal announced that it will consolidate sections and lay off staff as it seeks to stabilize its print business while it scrambles to grow its digital operations. Last week, the Journal laid off the staff of its “Greater New York” section and offered buyouts to 450 employees. Only 48 took the package, indicating that things could get ugly soon.

A new “Business & Finance” section will combine the Journal’s current “Business & Tech” and “Money & Investing” sections, Reuters reports. New York coverage will be reduced and moved into the main section of the newspaper.

The Journal has proved more resilient to the downturn than most print newspapers because of its pricey subscriptions and well-heeled readership. When the most optimistic statement management can make is that the paper is seeking to create a “print edition that can stand on a sound financial footing for the foreseeable future,” that doesn’t sound good.

Speaking of Reuters, the company completed this week’s morbid hat trick by announcing that it will lay off about 2,000 workers at a cost of $250 million as part of a “transformation” of its business. The silver lining – journalistically speaking – is that Reuters said none of the cuts will be in the newsroom. Instead, they will be focused in financial and technology operations that primarily serve financial services companies. Things have been tough in that business amid low interest rates and pressure from new-economy competitors. Reuters has the advantage of being a diversified company with a strong position in financial markets, but revenues are flat and there’s no indication of where additional business will come from.

We’re going to call a time-of-death on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, despite the fact that the newspaper says it’ll live on with a website. Everyone says that these days. The more important news is that the 24-year-old daily will shutter its print edition and lay off 106 staff members. It will maintain an online-only edition, but most dying newspapers say that.

Our favorite quote comes from Jennifer Bertetto, president and chief executive of Trib Total Media, which owns the Tribune-Review: “Our commitment to covering news in Pittsburgh and Allegheny County will not change.” Right. We’ll just do it with 106 fewer people.

In keeping with the pattern that has characterized other newspaper failures, the company’s official announcement doesn’t mention the closure or layoffs until the seventh paragraph.

It’s actually a lot fewer than that, when you consider the multiple cuts that parent company Trib Total Media has inflicted on its workforce over the past couple of years. Isolating the goings-on at the Pittsburgh paper is difficult, since Trib Total Media built its media empire in nearby Greensburg and only expanded into Pittsburgh in 1992 when the competing Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was in the midst of a strike. Billionaire Publisher Richard Mellon Scaife (note that Mellon is a rather big name in the region) launched the expansion after he failed in an attempt to buy the Post-Gazette. The Pittsburgh Business Times has a good timeline here.

As the number-two paper in a two-paper town, the Tribune-Review‘s back was always against the wall. Its weekday circulation of 89,000 and Sunday circulation of 168,000 were more than 40% lower than the Post-Gazette‘s, and Pittsburgh isn’t a very big market to begin with. Once Scaife died in July, 2014, the company he left behind focused its attention more on selling off assets than supporting journalism. An ongoing suit by Scaife’s heirs alleges that he threw good money after bad in attempting to keep the Tribune-Review alive.

Trib Total Media sold eight newspapers last October and laid off 153 employees in November. It shuttered the McKeesport Daily News – the Monongahela Valley’s longest-running daily – in December. Nearly 80% of the staff got a buyout offer in July. This is clearly a media business that’s looking to get out of the media business.

The loss of the Tribune-Review reduces by one the dwindling number of two-newspaper towns in the U.S. The fact that Pittsburgh, with a population of just 300,000 souls, held out so long is notable. Pittsburgh is a proud and beautiful city, if you ever get the chance to visit. Just don’t expect to find a choice of newspapers when you get there.

Several news outlets are reporting that AOL will shut down one-third of its Patch network of hyperlocal news sites and lay off about 300 people today. Newsday says AOL will close about 300 of its 900 sites and TechCrunch says layoff totals could reach 550. It’s unclear how large the Patch workforce is, but the last figure we saw was about 900.

A lot of reasons are being cited for Patch’s failure to get traction, ranging from competition from local newspapers to a crummy content management system. “Patch has gone from being free-wheeling to overly controlling with its local editors and then back and forth between the two,” writes TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm.

Our local Patch is run very well. Susan Petroni, a former daily newspaper reporter, covers the town so efficiently on a shoestring budget that her Patch site regularly scoops the local daily newspaper. However, the site is an unholy mess to look at, with ads and editorial content intermingled with each other seemingly at random. And Petroni’s discipline may not be typical. See  the comment titled “A PATCH INTERN’S STORY” on Romenesko for a more cynical view.

Patch has been dragging down AOL earnings since it launched, and CEO Tim Armstrong has pledged to make the network profitable by the end of this year or shut it down. It looks like this is a last-gasp effort to break even.

Update: Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that AOL will replace the head of the Patch divison and close or find partners for 400 of its community websites. The exact number of layoffs is still undetermined, but it appears it will be at the high end of the 300-550 positions that were rumored earlier today.

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New media tycoon Jeff Bezos (Image via CrunchBase)

History may well mark the typically somnambulant first days of August as the week that forever changed the U.S. newspaper industry.

In a stunning sequence of events, two young billionaires with no media experience bought iconic East Coast newspapers and affirmed their commitment to helping to rejuvenate an industry that has been in freefall for the past seven years.

The Washington Post Co. announced yesterday that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos would buy the company’s namesake newspaper for $250 million, ending eight decades of stewardship by the Graham family. The news came just three days after billionaire commodities investor John Henry was announced as the new owner of the Boston Globe.
The news continues a trend toward deep-pocketed investors making substantial investments in news organizations, shoring up depleted reporting staffs and experimenting with new business models. Value-investing icon Warren Buffett has snapped up more than 60 dailies and says he plans to buy more. In Southern California, greeting card magnate Aaron Kushner and his partners at Freedom Communications are turning heads with an aggressive investment strategy at the Orange County Register that is showing early signs of bearing fruit.

This is the best news the newspaper industry has had in years, and we think the management styles of these investors symbolizes the kind of long-term view that the business badly needs.

Long-Term Vision

Let’s look at the two newest arrivals on the media scene. We’ve watched both Henry and Bezos with interest for years, but for different reasons. Henry is the white knight who rescued our hometown Boston Red Sox from a tumultuous management struggle and brought the town its first World Series victory in 86 years. Bezos is an Internet pioneer who steered his company to greatness in a turbulent industry and forever changed retailing. The two men made their fortunes in very different industries but share a commitment to long-term vision and a belief in fundamental values.

When Henry took over the Red Sox in 2002, the team was actively negotiating to abandon Fenway Park and build a new stadium in the suburbs. The new owner promptly scuttled the negotiations and redoubled his investments in the team’s home field, shoring up the infrastructure, adding seats and experimenting with new revenue sources that would keep the team competitive with other big-market players. The strategy has paid off. The 101-year-old stadium is a huge tourist draw, and high ticket prices combined with innovative promotions have enabled the team to support a payroll and farm system that consistently keeps it at the top of the American League East. Fans complain about ticket prices, but they can’t complain about the team’s performance on the field.

Bezos was one of hundreds of online booksellers that jumped on the early Internet. He successfully steered Amazon through the ravages of the dot-com crash and intense competition from brick-and-mortar retailers to make it a $61 billion powerhouse that has changed the way Americans shop. Bezos has kept his focus on core principles like personalizing the shopping experience and delighting customers. He has resisted the urge to chase short-term opportunities and focused instead on big picture problems like chipping away at the cost and frustration of shipping. See Michael Moritz’s profile for a financier’s account of Bezos’ brilliance.

Amazon made some early missteps, such as investments in busted Web 1.0 startups like Pets.com and Kozmo.com, but it has executed almost flawlessly since the end of the dot-com bubble. It has sacrificed profitability for growth, but that hasn’t stopped the stock from rising ninefold over the last five years. With Amazon still under-performing in international markets and just beginning to crack the business-to-business opportunity, there is reason to believe its best days are ahead of it.

Rule-Changers

Long-term thinking as exemplified by Henry and Bezos is exactly the tonic the newspaper industry needs. Its woes are rooted in a merger binge that started in the late 90s, fueled by an appetite for short-term profits. As online competition has eaten away the circulation and revenue base of the U.S. industry, most publishers have responded by cutting costs, raising prices and hoping for the best. But you don’t transform an industry by cutting costs. You do it by changing the rules. Bezos and Henry are rule-changers.

Editor & Publisher reported last week on newspapers that are successfully experimenting with new revenue sources. We have long maintained that growth opportunities exist  for publishers in local markets if they can break their advertising addiction and partner with businesses in new ways. Wouldn’t it be nice to see the Post and the Globe blazing these trails?

It’s tempting to dismiss these relatively small investments (the $250 million purchase price of the Post represents just one percent of Bezos’ net worth) as low-risk bets by people with money to burn, but we think there’s more to it than that. Wealthy entrepreneurs know that healthy, independent media are essential to democracy and to capitalism. Media watchdogs keep government and regulatory excesses in check and ensure that markets operate predictably. They also provide business intelligence that isn’t easily available elsewhere. Both Henry and Bezos are avid newspaper readers.

We have no reason to believe that either of these new media owners has any plans to try to wring cash out of a dying business. On the contrary, Henry was quick to issue a statement affirming his belief in the importance of a healthy Globe to the region. Bezos is leaving the current Post leadership in place and said no layoffs are planned. “The values of the Post do not need changing,” he said. “The duty of the paper is to the readers, not the owners.”

Some people have speculated in recent years that the salvation of the newspaper industry would be donations from foundations and wealthy investors. Perhaps there’s some truth in that, but donations are a backhanded way of saying that a cause can never support itself. Warren Buffett, John Henry and Jeff Bezos all have their own philanthropic interests, but we don’t believe they see these newspaper investments as charity. They see value, growth and ultimately something  that has eluded publishers for the last several years: profit.

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Freedom Communications’ Aaron Kushner (photo by Jebb Harris, Orange County Register).

“California newspaper defies industry wisdom to stay alive – and prospers” declares The Guardian in an analysis of the Orange County Register‘s death-defying experiment under the leadership of a former greeting card executive with no background in newspapers.

Aaron Kushner (right) and his partner, Eric Spitz, formed Freedom Communications and bought the Register a year ago. They then stunned the shell-shocked newspaper industry by declaring their intention to go completely against the prevailing practice of layoffs and cost cuts. They would invest in print, double their reporting staff,  increase subscription prices and  put up one of the industry’s most rigid barriers to online access.

They’ve kept their promise. Newsroom staff is up to 360 from a low of 180 when Freedom took over. The Register routinely publishes daily issues that are nearly twice the size of its nearby rival, the Los Angeles Times. Page counts have been increased by half, color expanded and even the quality of paper improved.

Daily circulation is holding steady and total circulation is up sharply if you include the 28 weekly papers the company has invested in over the last 12 months. The Register has hired investigative reporters and lured newspaper wunderkind Rob Curley out of exile to rejuvenate the editorial product with a focus on local news and practical advice.

Freedom is showing particular sensitivity to  local businesses. One promotion late last year gave each reader the opportunity to contribute $100 worth of advertising to his or her favorite charity. Some 1,300 nonprofits benefited from the program.

Kushner thinks the time is right to place a big bet on print. “Never before and never again will so many people be in the sweet spot of newspaper readership as the next 20 years,” he told the Guardian. “It’s called the baby boom.”

There’s no doubt the Register is growing, but is it prospering as the Guardian‘s headline proclaims? The jury is still out on that.

Ken Doctor ran the numbers back in January and concluded that the Register may be able to cover its estimated $9 million+ in additional annual costs through higher subscription fees, but that the advertising market is in long-term decline and there’s little that any newspaper can do about that. Doctor contrasted Kushner’s growth strategy with the slash-and-burn tactics being applied by Advance Communications and said we’ll know in about two years whether growth or contraction is the recipe for success. Clearly, we’re pulling for Kushner.

Writing on CJR.com in May, Ryan Chittum said the odds are against Kushner, but noted that if he fails, “he will have gone down investing in journalism.” Chittum also has some revealing stats about the profitability of newspapers, which remains quite strong. When newspapers shut down, it’s because they can’t afford the cost of their debt, he says. Most are still in the black on an operations basis, which makes Advance’s frequency cutback strategy all the more puzzling.  It also suggests that value investor Warren Buffett  isn’t a billionaire for nothing.

Kushner says he’s in it for the long haul and he now has his eyes on a bigger prize: the L.A. Times. Tribune Co. is going to be looking to unload some assets now that it has exited bankruptcy, and many observers believe the Times will be on the auction block. If Kushner buys it, he can all but own the southern California market. Regardless of the  current fortunes of daily newspapers, having a  near-monopoly on even a shrinking media business in the country’s largest media market has to be attractive.

Related articles

• OC Register starts newspaper in Long Beach
• The OC launches a newspaper war in the LBC
• California newspaper defies industry wisdom to stay alive – and prospers | World news | guardian.co.uk
• Potential L.A. Times, Tribune buyers line up
• Against all odds, a new newspaper war erupts
• Aaron Kushner: OC Register is not an experiment. There are no experiments. There is no exit. By Michael Depp @NetNewsCheck

Continuing a newspaper industry tradition of burying bad news about its business, The Oregonian announced that it will scale back home-delivery frequency from seven to four days a week.

The news is tucked into the fourth paragraph of an otherwise effusive press release on Oregon Live that crows about the launch of a new company that will “expand news and information products in Oregon and Southwest Washington” and “introduce new and improved digital products.”

In reality, the main purpose of the new company over the next few months will be to hire survivors from Oregonian Publishing Co. which produces the state’s largest and longest continuously published newspaper. That company will close on Oct. 1. Oregonian write Brent Hunsberger provides balanced coverage – and leads with the real news.

Like newspapers in Detroit, the The Oregonian will continue to publish in print seven days a week but will limit distribution of Monday, Tuesday and Thursday editions to city newsstands. Its 170,000 home subscribers will see deliveries cut to Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday. In a baffling bit of doublespeak, the company also said home-delivery subscribers would get a Saturday edition “as a bonus.” It also stressed that the “Wednesday, Friday and Sunday editions will be enhanced with more content than current editions while the Saturday newspaper will have news and a strong emphasis on sports content, along with classified advertising.” In other words, a cut of 50% is an improvement.

The bigger story is that there will be unspecific but “significant” layoffs at The Oregonian, which currently employs 650 people. The paper, which has won seven Pulitzer Prizes and five since 1999, employs more than 90 journalists according to Hunsberger’s account. However, Ryan Chittum thinks the editorial cuts have been more severe. Writing on CJR.com, Chittum estimates that the newsroom staff has declined from about 315 in 2007 to 175 today. His assessment is blunt:

[Advance Publications’] new template for its newspapers is now depressingly familiar: End daily delivery; fire a third to a half of the veteran journalists, particularly the editors, particularly in news; replace some of them with young, inexperienced (and most important: cheap) labor; put them on the hamster wheel; toss around insipid buzzwords; spend a bunch of money on new offices; piss off readers; embolden competition.

Seems about right. Chittum also notes that Advance Publications’ cutbacks at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans backfired when a competitor from Baton Rouge moved in to take advantage of subscriber unrest. Advance has had to respond with a tabloid edition on days the Times-Picayune doesn’t publish, thereby negating many of its cost savings. Advance has said that it will make similar frequency cutbacks across its portfolio.

Oregon journalists are already rushing in to show their support. Former Oregonian reporter Ryan Frank has taken to social media to raise funds for a bar tab for laid-off staffers. He’s already raised more than $3,000. Follow the fund’s progress at #OregonianBarTab on Twitter. And give generously.

Thanks to Brian Parks for tipping us off to this news.

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Employees at the San Francisco Chronicle have taken to social media to protest a move by parent Hearst Corp. to impose a new healthcare plan that employees say is inferior to their current coverage and costs up to $3,000 more per year.

The Chronicle has been hanging by a thread since 2009, when Hearst nearly shut it down after complaining the newspaper was losing $1 million a month. A series of layoffs, pay freezes and cutbacks in vacation and holiday time have left employees frustrated and angry, and the latest move has brought that to the surface. they complain they’re being asked to put in even more hours to satisfy the demands of a new pay wall being put in place that will charge readers $14.99/mo. for premium content.

“We love the Chronicle, and we love journalism, but we can’t keep donating our own livelihoods to increase the profits of our corporate owners,” reads a post on the Friends of The San Francisco Chronicle Guild  Facebook page.

There’s also an online petition you can sign that demands fair healthcare for employees. You can also follow the #MakesUsSick hash tag on Twitter for updates. Some reporters changed their Twitter profiles to a red box as part of the protest. We’re not sure why.

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People have debated for some time what is the average age of a daily newspaper reader in the U.S. Eric Alterman said it’s 55 in a 2008 piece in The New Yorker, and the consensus is in that range. Now Alan Mutter has run some Pew Research numbers and looks at the number another way.

Alan Mutter Chart

According to Pew, less than 10% of people under the age of 30 reported that they had read a newspaper the previous day. In comparison, nearly 50% of adults over 65 had done so. Seventy-four percent of U.S. newspaper readership is concentrated in people over the age of 45, while that age demographic group represents only 39% of the population. And that group is getting older and dying while the under-45s are not.

What do all the numbers mean? “The industry is failing to replace older readers with younger individuals,” Mutter writes. “At some point, the newspaper audience may contract so severely that (a) publishers cannot attract enough advertisers, (b) publishers no longer enjoy the economies of scale necessary to print profitably or (c) both of the above.”

Few advertisers want to reach people over the age of 50, and almost no one wants to reach 65-year-olds. People in that age group often live on fixed incomes, have no children at home and very modest spending needs. They buy very little. Yet this is the core audience newspaper publishers have to sell to their advertisers.

A few years ago, Golin Harris CEO Fred Cook quoted an unidentified Chicago Sun-Times columnist as saying, “Newspapers aren’t dying; our readers are.” Whether a columnist actually said that or not, it’s an apt summary of the problem all mainstream media face. Watch the 6 p.m. network evening news some evening and look at the ads. They’re for pharmaceuticals, insurance and erectile dysfunction aids. Those advertisers know who the audience is. In 2010, the average age of a regular evening news consumer was 53, according to Pew. Where is that audience in 20 years? Where will the advertisers be?

The news industry’s challenge is to find products that appeal to young readers, but that requires taking risks, which is not something news executives are wired to do. The one saving grace could be that a lot of news organizations have laid off expensive senior staff and replaced them with young reporters. Perhaps those people will bring forth the ideas that enable the industry to grow again.

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The photo at right was one of several that made the rounds on the Internet as Hurricane Sandy lashed the east coast on Monday and Tuesday of this week. It’s a powerful image. It’s also completely bogus, a two-year-old Photoshop mashup that took on new significance when no one had a clear picture of what was happening on the Atlantic seaboard. It was one of many false reports that circulated on social networks during the storm. Although the increasingly Twitter-dependent mainstream media didn’t circulate this photo, it reported its share of falsehoods.

We personally heard the CNN report of three feet of water in the New York Stock Exchange. In fact, live security camera feeds showed that the floor was dry. We also heard media reports that Con Edison had shut off power to all of Manhattan. Also not true. The Detroit Free Press rounds up some of the prominent rumors here.

Instagram was the new kid on the block for this event. The photo-sharing service communicated some powerful images, like the fully lit Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn surrounded by flood waters (left), but it was also used to drag out Photoshopped favorites from years past that reappear with each new disaster. The Verge has a roundup of photos shared on Instagram and Twitter during the storm and the Atlantic put together a great collection of real, fake and questionable images shared on social media.

Are these deceptions proof that citizen journalism sucks, that the ability to reach a global audience tempts people to spread falsehoods and make mischief?

We don’t think so. While social networks spread a lot of rumors during the storm, that’s nothing unique to the Web 2.0 age. Disasters always spawn speculation. Remember the reports of planes flying into buildings in Chicago and San Francisco on 9/11? The difference today is the speed at which falsehoods spread. But another important difference is the speed at which they’re dispelled.

We like John Herrman’s analysis on BuzzFeed. He notes that Twitter users were just as quick to disabuse each other of storm-related misinformation as to spread it in the first place. “Twitter is a fact-processing machine on a grand scale, propagating then destroying rumors at a neck-snapping pace,” he writes. “To dwell on the obnoxiousness of the noise is to miss the result: that we end up with more facts, sooner, with less ambiguity.”

Sites like Snopes.com and Wikipedia are effective at sifting fact from fiction. Although neither is under the same time pressure as CNN, in the long run they get it right. Electronic media are always under the gun during a news event, and have always been susceptible to reporting bad information. To their credit, the news networks are usually good about qualifying unconfirmed information as just that. Any experienced reader of blogs or social networks knows that fantastical claims shouldn’t be taken at face value. New media even have some fact-checking features built in. For example, The New York Times used geo-location to verify that eyewitness tweets were in fact from people who might reasonably be assumed to be eye witnesses.

We think more information is always better than less, even if some of it is bad. As layoffs continue to hack away at mainstream media, those outlets continue to turn to citizens as front-line news sources. We don’t see that changing anytime soon. Rather, the tools for spotting bad information will mature and our bullshit detectors become more refined.

Anyone watching the #Sandy or #Frankenstorm hash tags on Monday and Tuesday read amazing stories from people who taking the storm head-on. Mobile social networks continue to deliver information from blacked-out areas that would otherwise have no outlet. The fact that some of that information is bad is the price we pay for having a First Amendment.

The photo at right was one of several that made the rounds on the Internet as Hurricane Sandy lashed the east coast on Monday and Tuesday of this week. It’s a powerful image. It’s also completely bogus, a two-year-old Photoshop mashup that took on new significance when no one had a clear picture of what was happening on the Atlantic seaboard. It was one of many false reports that circulated on social networks during the storm. Although the increasingly Twitter-dependent mainstream media didn’t circulate this photo, it reported its share of falsehoods.
We personally heard the CNN report of three feet of water in the New York Stock Exchange. In fact, live security camera feeds showed that the floor was dry. We also heard media reports that Con Edison had shut off power to all of Manhattan. Also not true. The Detroit Free Press rounds up some of the prominent rumors here.

Instagram was the new kid on the block for this event. The photo-sharing service communicated some powerful images, like the fully lit Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn surrounded by flood waters (left), but it was also used to drag out Photoshopped favorites from years past that reappear with each new disaster. The Verge has a roundup of photos shared on Instagram and Twitter during the storm and the Atlantic put together a great collection of real, fake and questionable images shared on social media.

Are these deceptions proof that citizen journalism sucks, that the ability to reach a global audience tempts people to spread falsehoods and make mischief?
We don’t think so. While social networks spread a lot of rumors during the storm, that’s nothing unique to the Web 2.0 age. Disasters always spawn speculation. Remember the reports of planes flying into buildings in Chicago and San Francisco on 9/11? The difference today is the speed at which falsehoods spread. But another important difference is the speed at which they’re dispelled.
We like John Herrman’s analysis on BuzzFeed. He notes that Twitter users were just as quick to disabuse each other of storm-related misinformation as to spread it in the first place. “Twitter is a fact-processing machine on a grand scale, propagating then destroying rumors at a neck-snapping pace,” he writes. “To dwell on the obnoxiousness of the noise is to miss the result: that we end up with more facts, sooner, with less ambiguity.”
Sites like Snopes.com and Wikipedia are effective at sifting fact from fiction. Although neither is under the same time pressure as CNN, in the long run they get it right. Electronic media are always under the gun during a news event, and have always been susceptible to reporting bad information. To their credit, the news networks are usually good about qualifying unconfirmed information as just that. Any experienced reader of blogs or social networks knows that fantastical claims shouldn’t be taken at face value. New media even have some fact-checking features built in. For example, The New York Times used geo-location to verify that eyewitness tweets were in fact from people who might reasonably be assumed to be eye witnesses.
We think more information is always better than less, even if some of it is bad. As layoffs continue to hack away at mainstream media, those outlets continue to turn to citizens as front-line news sources. We don’t see that changing anytime soon. Rather, the tools for spotting bad information will mature and our bullshit detectors become more refined.
Anyone watching the #Sandy or #Frankenstorm hash tags on Monday and Tuesday read amazing stories from people who taking the storm head-on. Mobile social networks continue to deliver information from blacked-out areas that would otherwise have no outlet. The fact that some of that information is bad is the price we pay for having a First Amendment.