Story here.
ht: SDA
Now the arrogant elite of the Big Papers will have to compete with news purveyors online who are willing to deliver relevant news with and without spin, and which offer far greater choice to news, information, opinion consumers.
This means that the Big Papers will have to go online (which they already have) and clean up their act (which they really haven't so far), become more scrupulous, comprehensive, fair, balanced, more hard-fact-oriented, less editorially-biased, than say, the blogosphere, which can actually be a better source of information sometimes than the Big, Corporate, "Mainstream" Media, as it's free-citizen-driven, rather than dictated by wealthy, powerful owners and special interests with an agenda to push. Freedom, such as that exists on the blogosphere, where anything can be published, sometimes leads to the truth getting out, truth which would otherwise be deemed by Big Media to be un-newsworthy, therefore ignored/covered up.
Of course, the consumer of any medium needs to exercise due diligence in healthy skepticism no matter which medium is used, keeping in mind that anyone, anywhere, anytime, may exercise an agenda, therefore affecting the reliability of that which they disseminate.
Increasingly, the internet is already replacing print media, which is much more expensive to produce and deliver, obviously, a reality that can easily be seen as its ultimate undoing, though perhaps not totally.
Television will also see online competition as a challenge, likely for similar reasons related to cost of production and distribution.
It's all going to change. No doubt about it.
And this change has some sweating bullets, like partisan politicians with a radical ideological agenda... just watch the Democrats in the U.S. push what they call a "Fairness Doctrine" bill and the Australian government moving to censor, without any real specificity as to unacceptable content, internet sites.
We see the likes of the Chinse Communist Party and the Iranian government already cracking down on expression online, persecuting those who dare to speak up against the government and its agenda.
Those who would try to control, restrict, censor the internet without strict, narrow guidelines as to what can and can't be touched by online police, will be seen as tyrants and oppressors.
It's fine to block/shut down, say, obvious child-porn sites, terrorist-recruitment/fundraising sites, that sort of thing.
But to introduce broad, ambiguous categories of acceptable-to-censor sites, such as "Criminal" or "Obscene" or "Against the values of the nation", etc... opens the door to arbitrary censorship, the likes of what we see happening via the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, which is arbitrary and discriminatory and which violates Canadians' rights, illegally, unconstitutionally, criminally deeming, without evidence, without a fair trial, what specific individuals who belong to specific identifiable groups can and cannot say. Oh, and they take thousands of dollars away from them as well.
Freedom is good. Let freedom march forward.
No longer will the elite, wealthy, powerful, ideologically-agenda-driven few control the dissemination of information, misinformation, spin, arrogant-dogmatic-opinion-masquerading-as-alleged-fact-based-lecture...
