2009: Ending the Dream World?

Posted on December 30th, 2008 by Bill Bartman

We were living in a dream world. The general public, and to a great extent the press, closed its eyes to the increasingly complex and baffling machinations of the financial industry, which kept screaming that oversight would ruin everything. – Bob Herbert, The New York Times

Bob Herbert’s comment about the U.S. public caught my attention not only because it is so true, but also because of its justified criticism of the nation’s “press.” It is the increasing failures of commercial news media – from missing an easily predictable financial catastrophe to a war started on laughably obvious false pretenses, to so much more – that arguably poses digital new media’s greatest challenge.

With 2009 just hours away, will it be a banner year for new media’s limitless information resources to effectively counter print, broadcasting, and cable’s failures to inform? At best, it can offer no more than a start. While newspapers and much of the publishing sector fade, new media lacks an effective business model not only for news and information, but for the Internet itself. We have barely begun a process to determine and invent what will work.

Two places to watch:

The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, which is actively encouraging “New Business Models for News.”
Social networking fanatic and guru Neal “The Puck” Jansons, who told Digital Pivot last August he is “working on a business model that will hopefully, in addition to changing the Internet landscape for the better by giving a method to separate signal from noise, also abstract and reassert the essential functions of the traditional “’Fourth Estate’”.

A national and international correspondent and investigative reporter for print, broadcast, and digital new media, Bill Bartman also consults telecommunications and information technology ventures.

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