LAT and Kerry worry about bloggers?

They should have worried about advertisers--business, commerce, capitalism, free enterprise, the markets--whatever you call that which the media have been systematically killing the last 20-30 years. Yes, we lost the local newspapers first--why did LAT, NYT and WSJ think that somewhere down the road it wouldn’t be their turn? Yes, advertisers need customers (readers, subscribers), but customers need someone besides the government (at all levels) to be in business, to be providing a service, to be competing to out do the next guy. Yes, technology and instant everything have changed the dynamics of information--but killing the golden goose of business by denigrating it sure didn‘t help. And bloggers will be next--we have nothing to say if the media collapse under the weight of their own foolishness and government regulation. Tweeting and Facebooking are much easier than blogging--and that will also contribute to "citizen journalism." However, if journalism has “values” as the author of the piece below claims, it certainly isn‘t objectivity or providing the facts (who, what, when, where, etc.). After 8 years of Bush bashing, and 3 years of Obama coddling, the media today are standing first on one foot and then the other, not knowing how to procede.

“There also is the important question of whether on-line journalism will sustain the values of professional journalism, the way the newspaper industry has. The new digital environment certainly is more open to “citizen journalism,” bloggers and the free expression of opinions.

In the last eight years, we have gone from zero bloggers to more than 70 million, and news is broken over twitter feeds and cell phones instead of on local broadcast networks. Just look at the way Janis Krums, a New York City ferry passenger, broke the news that flight 1549 out of LaGuardia had landed in the Hudson River -- he took a picture himself and tweeted the feed to an audience of thousands.” Top of the Ticket blog, LAT