View From the Phlipside - The Future of the News

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, Radio, the Movies and more. I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View From the Phlipside.

So what ARE we going to do about the news? I’ve commented here many times over the last couple years about the changes in the news industry. Primarily the ongoing demise of the daily newspaper with things like network nightly news not far behind it. The days when local radio was a real source for local news has largely passed (with all due respect for my friends who still toil away in local radio news. I love you guys and gals but radio as an industry turned its back on local news more than a decade ago).

So what’s going to happen next? Cable news networks will fill some of the gap. So much of their time these days seems to be dedicated to bloviating and shouting head death matches that I wonder if they are really interested in you know, reporting the news. Some newspapers and magazines are trying to find their way forward in digital form and I have some hope for that.

What interests me is the concept that Google is calling “citizen journalism”. Marshaling the force of smart phones to report live from the spot but at a number level no network EVER could have imagined. Getting people involved with pushing stories that they have a link to is a very interesting way to try and push editorial biases to the side.

There is of course a dark side to this as well and we’re seeing the first of it over the social news website Digg. At Digg people get to push stories they believe in or that they may feel the mainstream media isn’t covering enough. A group dubbed the Digg Patriots are apparently trying to rig the game. It appears about 100 folks with conservative politics have decided to use the system to bury as many stories that deem to be “liberal” as possible. By consistently downgrading the stories they can effectively make them disappear for the average viewer. With over 7 millions unique visitors in June these falsely named “patriots” can have a serious impact on the news that the rest of us see.

I don’t know what the next paradigm for the news will look like. I can only hope that it’s as balanced and fair as possible. That’s the real patriotism.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.


"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010