Seth Godin recently predicted that by 2012 “there will be no significant newspapers printed on newsprint in the US“.

Now
whilst that may be sensationalistic in terms of timescale – there is no
doubt that the newspaper industry is in trouble. In the six months to
March of this year the decline in US newspaper weekday circulation
almost doubled (Source: Bloomberg) and a number of historic US newspaper titles have already hit financial trouble.

Yes
the recession has hit media spend – but the core issue is that more
& more consumers are getting their news from the internet.

But that’s not really new news. What is new is how the internet is increasingly becoming the source for breaking news.

Last
Thursday night I was doing some things around the house with BBC News
24 on in the background. But rather than seeing a journalist on the
screen – there was a caption with an image of the TMZ.com
site leading with the news of Michael Jackson’s death. For the next
couple of hours the BBC’s news was simply reporting on the news from
TMZ and the LA Times. Mainstream news media reporting breaking internet
news.

In September last year, Robert Peston chose his blog to
announce the proposed Lloyds/HBOS merger before breaking the news on
BBC.

More recently, with reporting restrictions in place, the
news from Iran has been lead by blogs, Tweets and videos from people on
the streets.

In a 24-hour global news cycle no single news
organisation is going to have the coverage to capture every breaking
news story. So thanks to Twitter, blogs & the camera-phone the
power of the consumer-journalist is massive. News can be broken by
anywhere, anywhere, at any time.

Social media is increasingly driving the news agenda.

The challenge for the established media therefore becomes two-fold:

• How do they drive revenue from their online properties,
• How do they continue to verify the myriad of consumer-journalist sources?