Perhaps I’m a bit biased, and maybe this post might become a little self indulgent, but blogs have become an almost necessity in the marketing game over the last few years. frontiernews The term “blog” is basically a shortened version of the words: “web log” (because that’s so hard and tedious to say). Some of the original blogs date back to the early 1990’s where people basically kept an online account of their lives, basically an online diary.

Eventually people realized these journal entries could be used for a much more powerful purpose, to reach a wide stream audience for free, thus the creation of the blog. localletter Now we see blogs everywhere to the point where you can’t search for something without results for blogs popping up as well. Blogs now give voices to those who wouldn’t normally have voices years ago, in some cases it’s a good thing, while in other cases it’s a bad thing. But what this does is beg the question of whether or not Blogs and online media have or are killing the print media industry. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that as the internet exploded and became more interactive, newspapers and magazines saw a significant drop in readership which in turn led to a drop in profits to the point where journalism stables like the Boston Globe were teetering on the edge of going out of business. newspoke

The only papers that seem to be doing well now-a-days tend to be free weeklies like Metro or The Phoenix because they offer exclusive stories, interviews, topicals and reviews that are essentially print versions of blogs and most importantly go for the same price of an online blog…$0.00.

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Currently there are well over 112,000,000 blogs registered around the world, tbadaily a number that is sure to rise steadily not annually, not monthly, but daily. Blogs have become so prevalent in the main stream media that often times they are credited with breaking news stories, which raises the interesting question of whether or not journalism, in the traditional sense, is dead. kulfiy If the downward path of print media continues soon all the news will be purely online which could eventually lead to a dangerous precedent of integrity in reporting the news. In 20 years when kids who are only used to reading their news online have no “Washington Post” or “New York Times” to rely on for honest journalism and reporting, how will they be able to decipher which stories are true, and which is just some blogger hearing about a story and reporting it on memory?

Sorry, that was my diatribe on the need to keep print journalism alive. pressmagazines