Television vs Web 2.0
A recent media survey, that Joachim and I talked about in an earlier post, puts some numbers to a strong trend. Here’s an excerpt:
“Television is the big loser in media trustworthiness with the rise of the Internet. When asked where they turn first for trustworthy information, 29% of respondents in the U.S. still cite TV first, down from 39% three years ago. The Internet is now cited by 19%, up from 10% in 2003. The same trend is evident in the U.K., where television has declined from 42% to 33% as respondents’ first choice, while the Internet has risen from 5% to 15%.”
Why is (finally) television loosing ground, whereas Internet trustworthiness has doubled? I’d say because the web is a potentially much more powerful medium for building trustworthy institutions. Old-fashioned television just can’t compete. Seth Godin captures its dilemma as follows:
“News on television isn’t ‘true’. It can’t be. There’s too much to say, too many points of view, too many stories to cover. Television can never deliver all of the facts and every point of view. The best a television journalist can hope to do is combine the crowd-pleasing, ad-selling stories on fires and crime with the insightful but less popular stories on world events. And, we hope, to do it without an obvious bias.” [from All Marketers are Liars]
“The Internet” is a very heterogeneous medium in terms of what types of interactions or narratives it enables. Some of the most interesting projects in the Web 2.0 space aren’t very innovative from a technological standpoint. Indeed, they are first and foremost social innovations. They are movements that form new institutions with new organizing principles, many of which are concerned with solving social dilemmas. There’s an ongoing change as the web matures, with more and more sites becoming functional, trusted institutions. And that change, I believe, is what drives these numbers.
So, where are the newspapers? The same survey has this to say:
“Newspapers, which are often thought to be the most serious casualty of the Internet wave, show rankings essentially unchanged in most markets at approximately 20%. Newspapers remain the first trusted medium of choice for respondents in France, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Korea, and Italy.”
Why? Maybe because newspapers–as it stands today–are institutional forms with a future. As I see it, newspapers–although facing lots of challenges–have a much clearer migration path to renewing themselves and becoming part of the new media ecosystem. Newspapers, as institutions, seem to work well in symbiosis with The Long Tail of Blogs, and, for now, I see no signs of big change in that structure.
Hi Eric,
Nice to see the new website up and running. We should talk, if you drop me a mail.
On this another datapoint for you is that Forrester research (Social computing, Feb 2006) also backs the decline in trust of the TV from 52%in 2002 to 42% in 2004, a 10% decline in two years and well before the real growth of the blogosphere.
Televisions biggest value for news is that it is a cheap way to stream live events and most of us have our biggest screens configured as TVs. That’ll change.
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Definitely. According to This survey bloggers are the least trustworthy… But of course, i wouldn’t trust the individual blogger either. That’s also the wrong question to ask. It’s the whole ecosystem of bloggers with the right institutions and communities in place that makes ‘the internet’ trustworthy today.
the issue with newspapers is that despite what we may feel about how simple it is or would/will be for them to migrate online and incorporate video/podcasts as well as collaborative, open source citizen journalism, the fact remains that much of the print MSM–at least in the U.S.–has a difficult time not only appropriately integrating multi/new media concepts into their work, but also accepting what bloggers on the whole are really after: personal expression. we often hear newspaper-oriented journalists express that politically-oriented bloggers want to “take over” journalism, which is simply not the case. incidents like the cbs/dan rather scandal (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35531-2004Sep20.html) merely suggest that bloggers have an uncanny ability to help the MSM uncover facts that otherwise may have gone unnoticed or improperly reported. this kind of collaborative effort to report and search for ultimate truth suggests that it’s not bloggers in general that should or shouldn’t be trusted OR the MSM either. the smart newspapers will find a way to crowdsource their reporting and open up the process to bloggers; and ultimately i do agree that whatever kind of trust is built between the establishment and the bloggers will create a system capable of far greater reporting than previously possible. but again, newspapers aren’t ready and seemingly have a hard time trusting that amatuers can actually play a part in helping the journalistic process.