Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) has started a new citizen journalism enterprise that will help undereducated writers to do a better job covering the news of the world. Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) plans to move into the “tweet casting” of live events, just as to Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) has moved into the real news business. BuzzFeed has added scores of professional journalists to move beyond its silly lists that are so popular with Internet surfers. BuzzFeed also released a new product called BuzzFeed News. At the top of the pack, Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) has begun its own instant news project. New tech companies have moved into old media territory. News suddenly has become important again.
Contrast these brand new products created by Twitter and BuzzFeed to the “death of real, hardcore news.” Those old news products have been the foundation of the shrinking newspaper industry, which has existed for over a century, battered MSNBC and other struggling cable news channels, as well as worried television companies. The worry is fair. Traditional media’s own best strategies are bolted onto a new wave of news from companies barely a decade old. These companies will compete with them via technology products distributed via their online platforms, which were initially launched as means of basic communication. This basic communication has been mostly chatter between friends and to the broader world, chatter that had little value above personal sharing.
The trend by companies such as BuzzFeed might be considered a validation of the newspaper industry. In reality, the validation will accelerate the demise of newspapers. The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) is in the midst of launching Web-only products. They come too late. The distribution of news online to huge audiences has been seized already by much newer entities. The same problem has started to overwhelm the likes of CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS), which has started to move video online, but only tentatively. Tentative will not cut it, in the face of the large distribution networks of operations like Hulu and YouTube.
BuzzFeed decided that large numbers of professional journalists are a means to gain an audience beyond their silly lists. If the experiment succeeds, old media will be crippled more than it is already.
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