In the twenty-first century, American newspapers are struggling to keep their circulation figures high. Nightly network newscasts continue to shrink in audience share. Economic surveys of the American news industry suggest that mainstream news institutions have been challenged financially by expanding news and entertainment options online. Today, traditional news media organizations struggle to reinvent themselves and preserve their audience.
At the same time, however, new Internet media provide unparalleled opportunities for Americans to produce or contribute to their own news stories. In this way, the Internet has served to erode barriers between professional journalism and citizen amateurs. As University of Southern California professor Marc Cooper observed in a New York Times article, “There are all types of people out there who maybe aren’t journalists, but who can commit acts of journalism.” The implications of all this for the future of news in America, and for a truly informed American public, remain to be seen.
Today, it is easy to cover a news event and to blog about it online, even lacking journalistic credentials. During the 2008 election, experiments with online-based citizen news, much of it with a strong partisan bias, was fully underway. An influential new organization was www.offthebus.net, or OTB, which enrolled thousands of ordinary citizens to gather information about the ongoing campaign. OTB was inspired, in turn, by Arianna Huffington, whose site Huffington Post has become a favorite of liberal and progressive readers. In the more conservative camp is the Drudge Report]. As these examples suggest, now more than ever, it is important to be alert to the possibility of bias in your online media diet. But the available resources of information, and the range of citizens providing them, has never been greater.