One of the nice things about having system admin rights for the Movable Type install that powers the 150+ blogs we're running right now is that I can see all comments as they come into the system, and guage what's attracting attention.
Today?
Arguments about the root of climate change and the first flight of the Boeing 787.
Makes me think back with amusement to the days when journalists would tell me quite sincerely that nothing serious could be done on blogs...
Adam, quite seriously as regards the Irish media I forecast that within a decade there will be only one daily newspaper still in existence in Dublin serving all of the Republic of Ireland, and that newspaper will probably be " The Irish Independent " of the Sir Anthony O'Reilly - led Independent Media Group, whose main operation will be the installation of large media monitor screens throughout all the living rooms of Ireland, and as soon as Tony O'Reilly and his media competitors have their big screens up on the interior walls of every house in the country, even that last Irish national newspaper will be closed down by the Group.
Similarly in the UK and everywhere else, with print media surviving only in Africa and the Third World . They may even be integrated into huge screen TVs, but one thing is for sure, this 60-year-old veteran journalist -photographer , now running my own portrait studio - wedding-portrait photographers will survive as long as people get married and have babies! - will probably live to see the day like most journalists here. Friends of mine in the world-renowned Trinity College Dublin Computer Science Department are convinced of this, professors and lecturers there openly proclaiming the revolution ! ( Though they'll badly miss their " Irish Times " . )
Print newspapers will be a thing of the past, like analogue photography ( though Pro's like me, .001 per cent of the population, still use the best of both analogue and digital, particularly our favoured Hasselblads, buying up the best-ever film Nikon F5's and F90s for instance at toy camera prices from our former newspaper employers , such was the power and fury of that digital camera explosion when it came ) , this digital media revolution is going to descend on us as fast as digital photography has over the past decade !
What most of our colleagues don't realise at our age is that the upcoming generation of the broad population has no particular attraction to the newspaper format, little at all, certainly not like us former paper journalists have, and that's why they are going to be more staggered than anybody else as our old world crumbles all around us :-) . At least it will save a lot of trees, it's an ill-wind.....
The very best thing any employed journalist can do right now is to retrain in this digital electronic media environment if they still want to have any kind of a a job in journalism within a decade . Just to start blogging themselves would be the best way, I should think .
Newspapers are become far too expensive to maintain - right now the Johnston Group have all their Irish titles up for sale, pulling out of the country next May after they tried even the harshest of staff cuts to survive.
The game will be up for unions like the NUJ and they know it too , only the small professional journalist bodies concerned with ethics, legalistics and the status of journalists ( such as the CIOJ ) will survive - for the NUJ there will be no shops left to close !
I think that the NUJ sees the writing on the wall and that this is the reason that they are trying so desperately hard to insert themselves into the coming new digital media revolution , as their prized well-paid union jobs are at stake, gone, so you can hardly blame them .
Few will shed any tears for many of them either as the nepotism, croneyism, and even the bit of old corruption will be gone with them , as the 1's and the 0's take over from the " Nudge " .
But it's not about the NUJ at all, they're all hardened people who can survive selling EF cars or whatever. We'll miss the old newspapers that will only be a memory, and a great memory too, in a dozen year's time, or even less , and the legendary old characters we all once knew and loved, most of them gone to their graves by now, their beloved old scandal sheets to follow as our old watering holes such as the Cheshire Cheese , the Tipperary and the Bell in London, Mulligans, The Oval and The Palace Bar in Dublin speak of them silently from photos on the wall. Many of us buried a newspaper or two in our time, this is going to be a holocaust .
Merry Xmas All, .
Cheers,
Michael .