I suspect we're seeing a classic disruptive innovation at work here. A new technology (blogging) arrives that provides lower quality than existing markets demand, but does so at dramatically reduced cost. Existing solutions have overshot the quality levels demanded by the marketplace - the average American can't tell the difference between FOX News and the New York Times. The existing market remains, but is dwarfed in size by the new market for low-quality, shoot-from-the-hit journalism. Meanwhile, incumbents find they can't meet the cost structures necessary to compete in the new market.
I suspect that the New York Times will go the way of the Betamax and the Lisp Machine. It becomes a quaint relic of a technically superior age, but nobody actually buys it anymore.
The good news is that once a disruptive innovation has taken over the market, it usually improves to eventually match the original incumbent. So after a few years of drek, we'll see the worst, most content-free blogs die off and be replaced by people who put more thought into it. I suspect this is what'll happen to the best reporters - after a few lean years, they'll start up blogs, people will realize that those blogs give much better information than the competition, and they'll end up making much more than they ever did while working for a newspaper. After all, they don't have to share all the ad revenue they generate with the print staff anymore.
Only the best reporters, though. It'll suck to be a mediocre reporter, just as it sucks to be a mediocre real estate agent now and it sucked to be a mediocre programmer in 2002. The field will probably shrink significantly, but that's the whole point of capitalism - freeing up labor to work in fields where they'll be more productive.
I'd like to think that is true but don't see evidence to support it. For instance, blogs don't seem to solve the problem of aggregation, which requires a special group of editors to evaluate content quality.
Consequently, I wouldn't expect the best reporters to be able to make more - I'd expect the worst reporters to make the most money. That is, those that are willing to dumb down/spice up the content so that it sells well. I call this the News Corp/Myspace effect and don't see any effective counter.
Yes, but who's going to pay the intrepid journalists to go out to Iraq? That's the part of the model that I can't quite figure out yet. If the AP can't sell their content, who's reporting in Angola? Who's covering the un-sexy stuff in Nevada elections, etc.
The other is the issue of aggregation. It might just be that bloggers are the new journalists and Techmeme/GoogleNews are the new New York Times, so maybe it's not a huge problem, but overall, I think most people aren't interested in building up and filtering RSS feeds to find the news they care about.
Ok, but integrating all of that into something quickly and easily digestible, checking it for facts, and checking to see if it's even covering the whole story is still not something part of that ecosystem. There's a startup for someone, but I'm not sure it's something that's going to be tech driven...
Most popular bloggers lean towards collect stories -- they don't write them.
Blogs are a distributed newsroom: reporters and editors don't even have to know each other to outwrite and outthink the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.
Those are all politics, all the time. Something like cnn.com has a much better mix of stories, even if they're certainly not stellar journalists. People are motivated to get involved in politics stories for free (everyone has an opinion, and to judge by lots of people, don't even need much in the way of facts to have one), but much less so to go out and do real reporting.
Part of the 'disruptive innovation' model in The Innovator's Dilemma is that the innovation rapidly gains in quality. As others points out below, I don't see that happening with bloggers in much of what they 'cover'.
I suspect that the New York Times will go the way of the Betamax and the Lisp Machine. It becomes a quaint relic of a technically superior age, but nobody actually buys it anymore.
The good news is that once a disruptive innovation has taken over the market, it usually improves to eventually match the original incumbent. So after a few years of drek, we'll see the worst, most content-free blogs die off and be replaced by people who put more thought into it. I suspect this is what'll happen to the best reporters - after a few lean years, they'll start up blogs, people will realize that those blogs give much better information than the competition, and they'll end up making much more than they ever did while working for a newspaper. After all, they don't have to share all the ad revenue they generate with the print staff anymore.
Only the best reporters, though. It'll suck to be a mediocre reporter, just as it sucks to be a mediocre real estate agent now and it sucked to be a mediocre programmer in 2002. The field will probably shrink significantly, but that's the whole point of capitalism - freeing up labor to work in fields where they'll be more productive.