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.