[Reader-list] convergence, civic style

[ravikant at sarai.net]

This is a follow up on Sevanti Ninan's piece, especially for those who
wish to dig deeper on the relationship between newspaper and internet. The
following chapter is part of a larger study, available online at:

http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~keckem/research.html

Enjoy and circulate

ravikant

An excerpt:

Impact of Internet on Journalism: the Newspaper Metaphor
By Erin Keck

In 1998, Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen predicted that legacy media
such as newspapers and magazines would be replaced by integrated Internet
packages of text, video, and reference materials between 2003 and 2008.
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates predicted in 1999 that newspapers would stop
making print editions by 2018. These are only two of many forecasts of the
death of newspapers, a form of "mediacide," in the wake of the
popularization of the Internet in the past decade.
Some of these estimates must be reined in significantly since the jubilant
optimism of the Internet was crushed by the failure of many dot-com
companies in 2000. Now it appears that online news will not be an agent of
mediacide replacing print news as many have predicted. More likely, it is
going through a period of "mediamorphosis" to become a complementary
medium to traditional newspapers. However, online journalism cannot rely
on traditional models of news production, and must find its own style
based on the newspaper metaphor. This paper will examine the
mediamorphosis phenomenon and how it has created a newspaper metaphor for
online journalism that can be beneficial for traditional newspapers and
new media....