Battle of the bongo drums continues

As far back as 2006, the BBC was debating the battle between online news sites and newspapers. News-junkies were reporting to be turning increasingly to the Net for their daily fix of world events, and papers consequently beginning to feel the pinch.

In the media landscape of 2006 there was space for every one with enough money and expectations flowing around for newspapers and the online world to enjoy the spoils together. But, at the start of 2009 things are looking slightly less comfortable. Roy Greenslade is predicting that newspaper sales will decline further during 2009 and, what’s more, he says the closure of one paper will not benefit another: rather the resulting readers will vanish off into cyberspace.

The recent use of social media by Israelis following the Gaza conflict has lent it more credibility as a source of news. Although citizen journalism has to be sifted and weighed, it has the benefit of being immediate and thereby satisfying the global community’s need for information.

What makes it so powerful is its ability to connect people that are searching for the same things – niche news that might not sell newspapers will find a forum on the Internet. Using Alexa rankings and other popularity measurement tools we can find out which news sites are visited most and this is perhaps an indication of how credible they are.

But even if an online news website is ranked low, small news sites can flourish because of their low running costs. In this way “cat news from around the world” which has an Alexa ranking of 419,061, can co-exist with BBC weather which has an Alexa ranking of 46. In a depressed economy some media outlets may find that their only future lies online.