.. Frontline.. new News?

So if anyone has watched Frontline last week then they probably know that it was all about news media and how it is rapidly changing. They focused a lot on the emerging trend of blogging and indy-media as well as online developments that really relate well to our class. Firstly, most of America actual investigative reporting is done by newspapers, which are the hardest hit by the shift of news media to the internet (they lost a significant portion of classified ad revenue), but this is changing. The complaint is however that blogs and online news have caused the depth of coverage to significantly decline. This decline is due to the fact that newspapers that do most of the original reporting are having to cut costs and fire journalists. The problem with this is that most other news services simply regurgitate the stories that are first captured by newspapers. If the depth of coverage by newspapers declines, then it declines for all of news media as well.
But wait a minute, I thought blogs increased the flow of information, so I was confused as to why the quality of news coverage would decrease. The problem with blogs as they are today is that most of them are opinion-based, not original-reporting based. Most blogs today focus on news stories that have already hit the headlines and include simple commentary about a story. While it is true that blogs are emerging as a sources of individual reporting the concern is that they will not be able to mount as much of an effort to investigate a story as the large newsrooms at major newspapers used to be able to. We generally tend to think of the internet as expanding the flow of information, but ironically, this new technology has not made people freer but simply limited the types of information people can get. I try to view it is this way, there is now a smaller amount of information being created but it is being distributed in many more ways to many more people that ever before. This is of course the tradeoff, although news is now more accessible, the quality of news has gone down.
Frontline portrayed this with an almost fatalistic view, but I think that the expansion of the news onto the internet will also eventually lead to more original reporting. I think the problem is that people haven’t really figured out the best way to go about it, they are pioneers. The newspaper industry took awhile to develop its routine and its practices, so I think today we are in a period of transition. Once people and their ideologies can catch up to technology however, I think we will see a real benefit from online journalism and news media.