News Web - Tangled Internet

I Predict News Junkies And Plenty Of Them! 

U.S. teachers are utilizing Internet news more than any other source in presenting news to their students. Fifty seven percent of teachers use Internet based news. A study based on news use in the classroom surveyed 1,262 teachers in grades 5-12 in the fall of 2006. The study was released Monday by the Carnegie-Knight Task Force on the Future of Journalism Education.

These numbers compare to 31 percent teacher use of television news and 28 percent usage of daily newspapers. Local television news was at the bottom of the list with only 13 percent according to the study. The findings reflect a wider trend in the U.S.of falling circulation and advertising revenue for newspapers as more people utilize online media for their news.

The future of traditional media is becoming somewhat questionable as news organizations and the companies that utilize it become aware of the trend. The most popular sites for online news are owned by organizations like the BBC, The New York Times and CNN.com according to the study.

The study points out that teachers prefer the printed newspapers, but that students relate better to the online versions. According to the survey, the biggest reason for loss of classroom preference is that newspapers have not promoted their Web sites as they could have.

Local papers "haven't recognized how quickly this transition is taking place," said the study's author, Thomas Patterson, a professor at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Experts fear that local and national newspapers will not act fast enough to promote their online variants. Some newspapers move more slowly, said Jim Abbott, vice president of the Newspaper Association of America Foundation. The foundation's goal is to create a generation of news junkies, who will always thirst for information.

The Take

We have reported previously on the Web taking over traditional business, and migration to the web by business. This is simply not advanced physics! Online media is a cheaper infrastructure, the number of users grows continually, according to Bill Gates - the Web will overtake television in 5 years. Please note just one thing about this press release - the links listed as affiliates to the new migration. In fact every business entity mentioned in this release is a traditional business firm. This is not really new either, I just wonder at all the subterfuge, or is it obtuseness? Examining the home page of The Carnegie-Knight Foundation, it is interesting to note the following statement:

 "Crucial to the authority and credibility of the Task Force will be a body of research that will be aimed at bolstering its arguments and supporting its vision for change."

Does that say what I think it says? We have to consider what is beyond the obvious in order to make sense of our lives, our direction and the ends we seek. There is currently the equivalent of a media blitz about the future validity and viability of the Internet as a platform for virtually everything. Consider the following information:

1. Bill Gates attended Harvard University (1973-left junior year) - Bill - essentially TV will be on the Web in 5 years.
2. The press release you just read was essentially issued by an institute based at Harvard University.
3. Tim O'Oreilly was a graduate of Harvard University (1975) - He coined the phrase "Web 2.0".
4. President Bush - MBA graduate of Harvard (1974-1976) - Bush selected Richard D. Parsons to co-chair a committee on Social Security.
5. Richard D. Parsons did not attend Harvard - He was an attorney for Nelson Rockefeller and is CEO of Time Warner, which owns AOL and CNN.
6. Dr. Diane Coyle - Did graduate Harvard (1985) - Appointed Board of Governors for the BBC- Revamped 1/1/2007.
7. Jeffrey L. Bewkes - Did not attend Harvard, but attended Yale where President Bush got his BA - Bewkes is COO of Time Warner.
8. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. - Publisher of the New York Times, Graduated Tufts University (1974)- Tufts is 5 miles from Harvard.

Without going too deeply into the ties that might bind all these people, please think about the people we listen to, look at and often take for granted as symbols. These people are often much more than we perceive them to be. The same holds true for all the press we get about Web 2.0 and the trend towards Web business. Take for example the complexity of just one of these people I have mentioned. A recent interview was given by Dr. Diane Coyle, in which she made some very interesting comments, and I quote part of a Q & A:

"3AM: So who do you connect with?

DC: Marx is good because he thinks about technology and understands very well that it completely transforms the economy. Very few other writers have made that connection."

Dr. Coyle is a very learned and interesting woman, and I am not suggesting that she is a Marxist or anything of the like. You must understand that the people who make things "shake and move" are not stupid. Dr. Coyle is an economist, and these people think in terms of short term and long term. What I am saying is, we are just seeing what someone else may have envisioned quite some time ago. Our mission should be to really understand what is happening in the world. The Web is an ever growing forum for us to do just that. So, if you want to know if these people were bosom buddies at Harvard, Yale, Oxford or Stanford, help me out and find out. I will tell you that Gates, Bush, and O'Reilly were at Harvard at about the same time, and Sulzberger was 5 miles away at Tufts.  

Please, just don't get so involved in the self gratification one gets from playing at blogging, video, or virtual reality that you miss a really big transition. This effects all of us, and it is all probably more important than you can imagine. It is a little freaky thinking that the future of the modern world might have been drawn on a cocktail napkin at some Boston Pub.