Hullo–fancy seeing you here, David.
Ideological proclivities aside, I would say the problem is Graigs List, pure and simple. It has killed the income stream and profitability of the majors. A highly successful businessman once told me:”Everyone wants to eliminate the middleman–they just can’t figure out how to eliminate the middle-man’s costs.” Blogs are essentially parasitic taken as a hole–sucking the life out of major news organizations by by-passing the middleman and avoiding his costs–but NOT eliminating them. My prediction is that the blogosphere in toto will end up like the predator without any competitors who accidently wanders into an isolated oasis or billabong that is otherwise in biological stasis and begins eating everything in sight. Eventually all prey are killed and the predator, his food source eliminated, starves to death–biologists who later hove on the scene finding only skeletons including that of the outside predator.
Collection and analysis of news costs money. Neither individual bloggers nor blog groups have it in sufficient quantities to finance original reporting and research on a consistent, daily basis. When the MSM is gone, it will take much of the materials (in the form of news) with which bloggers work–especially individual “life-style” diary-style and essayist long-form cultural bloggers. The blogosphere will at that point shrink radically and, with the MSM largely gone, the ability to source news by the average individual will become more limited, fractured and haphazard. Craigs-list is the predator which crept into Eden. Without it the blogosphere would have prospered as a competitor/adjunct alongside the MSM by feeding off of it even as the mainstream print media continued on it’s merry way with MSMTV, who depends largely on print MSM in train.
As it is the demise of the MSM will, I feel, prove a Pyrrhic victory for the blogosphere.
(PS:I thought Dayton had a fair team this year–too bad they weren’t more consistent)
