|
Seems that the death of print is a popular subject these days. The end of many print publications is not in itself a bad thing. However, these organisations are one of the key bastions of journalism in the world, and no one knows who is going to fill those shoes.
A recent time magazine has an article on how a micro transaction model might be the way to save journalism (not necessarily newspapers!).
In the gaming world, journalism issues have been going on for quite some time, with the gaming mags some of the first to go the way of the dodo. For a while, large media/web sites have been a haven for gaming journalists, but now we are seeing increasing numbers of sites reduce staff numbers (e.g. 1up), and/or reduce the quality of their content (insert your hated guff gaming site here).
The reduction in article quality seems to be proportional to how advertisement driven the site is, although I am prepared to proven wrong on that. So I do worry how we are going to go, both within the gaming world, and in news in general, with web sites funded solely by advertisement revenue. There has to be multiple revenue streams for these businesses to survive in the medium and long term.
In a recent gamers with job podcast (linked here), Robert Ashley was on board chatting with the guys about the future of gaming journalism (and creative content related to gaming). He’s fairly jaded in parts, and a tad pessimistic, but it’s an excellent listen. In one part, he likens publishing content on the web as like pissing down a well… i.e. does anyone notice? 
Certainly plenty of folk are thinking about how the news media is going to evolve, and no one seems to have a functioning crystal ball!
- Scoobs
|
