This claim by Dave Winer is just silly,
I was interviewed today by a Japanese wire service. They asked if weblogs spelled the end of newspapers. I said they didn’t have to, if the professional news organizations adopted the technology.
Weblogs don’t have a chance of spelling the end of newspapers. Winer makes a big deal out of this story where a person posted photos of illegal dumping on his web site and the story subsequently was picked up by a local newspaper.
Does Winer think that reporters go out on patrol like Batman looking for stories to report on? No, they get their leads and story ideas from people like this guy. In my spare time I’m always pushing for the local newspaper or the student newspaper to run stories about things that I care about that I’m certain the editors there no nothing about (and I succeed most of the time — which is a lot of fun when the student paper ends up scooping the local Newhouse rag).
What I would like to see, however, is something else that Winer recommended recently — transcripts. I’d love it if the local paper or even the student paper would include a link to transcripts of city council meetings alongside their story about the meeting. Some federal agencies are now posting transcripts of their press conferences on the web (which has embarassed more than one reporter whose summary of a press conference was questionable), and I think we need a lot more of that.
Finally, Winer includes this odd article by Edward Champion which makes the incorrect claim that “people are starting to reject newspapers.” But the article that Champion cites doesn’t warrant that conclusion.
A Pew Research Center poll found the number of people who said they read a newspaper on the previous day had fallen to 41 percent in 2002 from 47 percent in 2000. I’m not sure how helpful a metric this is, however. There are a number of polls that ask people whether they read a newspaper at least five days a week, and those numbers have tended to be pretty stable in the high 40s for several years now. Certainly newspapers are getting killed by problems generating sufficient ad revenue (and, until recently, high newsprint prices), but the readership is still there.
If anything, I suspect weblogging increases the market for newspapers. Five years ago I used to surf the web to supplement my newspaper habit. Now I buy a newspaper to serve as an offline news source for those times when I’m not near my computer (or during Windows NT’s interminable reboot periods).
Television news, on the other hand, has become a wasteland. Only 32 percent of Americans told Pew that they regularly watch one of the nightly network news shows and that’s with the 9/11 attacks. I suspect that without 9/11 that figure would have been significantly lower. Regardless, at those levels of viewership, it is questionable how long all three network broadcasts will last. At some point the temptation for network affiliates to substitute syndicated programs for the network news broadcasts will be too great.