Mitch Joel on the Death of Old Media | Micheal Rosenblum on Citizen Journalism and Crowdsourcing

The Fall of Print Journalism and the Rise of Digital and Crowdsourced Journalism: The Future of the Web and Communication

Is mainstream media dying on the vine? Mitch Joel suggests it just might be:

If you thought things were ugly for the publishing industry before the economic meltdown, it’s getting increasingly hard to turn your head and not hear the woes of traditional media. Some even argue that these traditional media companies are using the economic crisis as an excuse to cut staff and projections even more.

Advertising Age reported this news item today: Newspaper Ad Revenue Falls Nearly $2 Billion. That makes it a record 18.1% decline in the third quarter, based on news from the Newspaper Association of America. On top of this, newspaper’s online ad revenue also dropped for the second quarter in a row.

“The historic drop resulted from a worsening economy that sharply exacerbated long-term challenges already confronting the newspaper industry, and it affected all kinds of newspaper ads. National ad sales fell 18.4%, classifieds sank 30.9%, and the biggest category, retail, slid 11.7%. Newspapers’ online ad sales, where everyone is hoping some part of the future business model resides, accelerated their decline with a 3% drop. Online ad sales slipped 2.4% in the second quarter,” according to the Advertising Age news item.

Given that, will citizen journalism take over? Some people, like Steve Outing, only give the publishing industry 6 months.

Alternative Models of Monetizing Journalism and Citizen Journalism in the Information Age
Is the future of our news media crowdfunding or crowdsourcing based? Micheal Rosenblum, who is a former member of the main stream media and is now a professed citizen journalist is certainly passionate about the issue and provides a great deal of insight about this digital revolution in communication and media that is occurring right under our feet. Its a great watch…

(warning: he uses fowl language near the end)

Citizen Journalism, Crowd sourcing, and Crowd Funding Resources:
Tips for monetizing citizen journalism.

Daily Blog Tips has an extensive list of ways to monetize blogs, which certainly carries over into citizen journalism blogs.

Both the Gawker network and Allvoices have interesting monetization for citizen journalism. All voices is a far more open network, with writers earning a percentage of money for X number of views.

The Information Valet Project is a strategic way to monetize citizen journalism. Its headed up by Bill Densmore of the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute of the Missouri School of Journalism, wheres he is a visiting professor. (Authors get paid to create content. Sponsors get paid to look at very targeted ads) “It aggregates purchases and ad views. You can have one account.” (here is his Power Point presentation.)

N Stein offers a systemic way to create ad revenue for large digital publishers.

Other applications of the crowd funding concept to various sectors and industries. Of course the Obama campaign did a great job of tapping low budget donors.

Looking to fund your startup in the short run? Read/Write Web has some answers.

• Online Journalism Review on some of the downsides of certain models of user created content and journalism

• Almost everything you need to know about Hyper local journalism from current case studies.

• For more on the state of print journalism vs. digital journalism or rather traditional journalism in the digital context, check out Rex’s post.

Have any great posts or links about monetizing participatory citizen journalism communities? Or any ideas about crowdfunding?

(image credit: bre pettis)