Three powerful trends are converging that may soon drain popular columnists and even cartoonists nearing retirement age away from mainstream outlets to micro-media, such as Weblogs.
For one, journalists are getting grumpier. Pew Research's survey of American journalists, released yesterday, reported that journalists are increasingly feeling that big media financial pressures are hurting the quality of news coverage. The percentage of national journalists surveyed by Pew who say that bottom-line financial pressures are hurting coverage was 66 percent this year, compared with about 40 percent in 1995.
"Journalists are in a glummer mood than we've found them in the past," Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center told AP. "That view is much more prevalent where cutbacks have happened."
Second, Google Adsense, Blogads and Amazon.com's Honor System are slowly creating new ways for bloggers to make money. The business models are nascent and the ad dollars are microscopic right now; all reminiscent of online advertising circa 1994. But eventually these systems will mature, enabling experienced writers to live off their blogging.
Finally, as blogging gets more press and publishing tools get even easier to use, more of us will join the blogosphere. On the plus side, this means blog readership will increase. But the downside is the overall quality of writing will decline. Darwinism will take over - only the strongest writers with established audiences will truly be able to economically profit on the blogosphere.
When all of this comes together it will give popular columnists and cartoonists nearing retirement age all the reasons they need to jump to the blogosphere. They'll find a nice way to keep writing as they supplement their pension incomes.
