We takin' over

With all this talk of recession, everyone in the news industry is wetting their pants over the impending blogosphere.




I would just like to note that blogs do not replace news. They complement it. The only part of the newspaper replaced by blogs may be the opinion section and possibly the sports section. It's just silly to wait until the next day to read about how your sports team did. And it's way better to read opinion pieces that have an abundance of profanity and no limits on political correctness, and all that jazz.

Any publication that does not embrace online technology and exploit it, are the ones that will be waving good-bye to their readers. To not enhance your publication to make it more convenient and accessible to everyone is backwards, and the journalists who refuse to upgrade will find themselves out of a job. It's natural for us who grew up in the information age to accept these changes - not that they are changes for us. But for the dinos like Buzz Bissinger who think that the blogosphere has nothing to offer journalism, I would like to hand them a shovel and inform them to begin digging their own grave already.

What does an old bag of bones like Bissinger care that online journalism is taking off, other than he may be out a job sooner than he likes? The point is, is online journalism - including blogs in all their uncensored and unabashed glory - isn't for the aging populous. It's for us up and comers, who don't like unfolding a giant spread in crowded coffee shops or on the TTC and mucking through the various articles we have no intent or care to read. I mean, unless these newspapers want to specialize in gerontology, they're really going to have to embrace this whole Wild Wild West thing.

My parents are over 50, they read the paper. I laugh at the thought of my poor father squinting his eyes at a computer screen trying to read the news. He will leave the paper out on the table when he leaves for work, in hopes I will read it. Each time he comes home and sees his beloved orderly folded paper, dissected and haphazardly thrown back together after I finally found the cartoons.

I'm not saying that journalists don't deserve to be paid or that the newspaper is dying. I hope that those things are not true, as it is the business I hope to enter soon. But the industry NEEDS to stop looking at online and critisizing and mocking it. They need to hop off their elitist pedastels and utilize the new medium to their advantage. Maybe it isn't the Internet's fault that you are losing readership, newspapers, maybe it is your own fault for not adjusting your format to the new generation of news-consumers. Ultimately, the publications (cough, Globe and Mail, loves it) that do embrace the benefits of the blogosphere, wikis, Facebook and Twitter, etc. are the ones who will be around after the Ice Age.


-- the golden girl