A new trend is emerging in the undergraduate college library system. The University of Texas in Austin is attempting to empty its shelves and turn the libraries into an electronic heaven with online resources that can fulfill any undergraduate’s needs. According to NY Times, this is a trend that many colleges are turning to and signing on. However, there are many mixed feelings as to whether or not online materials can replace books. For more information read the NY Times article “College Libraries Set Aside Books in a Digital Age.”

Here is a great article on the debate and competition between old media and new media and American news. Check it out for opinions on why there is a shift, consequences, and great research on this topic.

If you follow US politics and opinion journalism even peripherally, then you know that the one thing that the entire political spectrum—right, center, and left—can agree on is that the American news media is in trouble.

TV vs. Mobile is the new debate going on in new media. With a society so dependant and centered around TV, are we seeing a shift to the Internet and mobile technologies? Most Americans plan their lives around television shows. With the user-friendly availibility of mobile technologies, many are turning their backs on the “classic” TV and taking notice to iPods, Internet news, wireless connections, etc. It is almost like America has gone wireless.

Over the last 50 years television has taken a unique place in our lives, culture and homes. Not only do we spend hours in front of the ‘box’, but, there are hundreds of magazines and websites devoted to TV. We even plan the layouts of our homes around the TV set or plasma screen. But TV’s role as the ‘key’ channel to the consumer, are today numbered.

Even with the appeal of music videos and reality TV, we have observed the younger generations shifting their time from TV to the internet via MSN, video-gaming and the mobile phone. Television and broadcast plays an increasingly different role for Generation ‘C’ or the Community Generation.

File-swapping has been an inevitable consequence of what we know has the “world wide web.” From downloading a famous artist’s new song before they even leave the studio to burning a copy of the latest blockbuster the same week in debutes, piracy on the Internet is stronger and more evident than ever. The problem is that it is illegal! Well, now we have a solution. Congress has approved a bill that will allow for “pre-release pirates” to be arrested and put in jail. This bill could even make anyone with a copy of a pirated movie a felon. This should lead to some interesting debates.

The bill could be used to target casual peer-to-peer users, although the Justice Department to date has typically reserved criminal charges for the most egregious cases.

Invoking a procedure used for noncontroversial legislation, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the measure, called the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act. Because the bill already has cleared the Senate, it now goes to President Bush for his signature.

Enactment of these criminal penalties has been a top priority this year for the entertainment industry, which has grown increasingly concerned about the proliferation of copyrighted works on peer-to-peer networks before their commercial release.

XM and Sirius satellite radio are gaining traction in the media world. As they challenge AM/FM radio, they are also making their way into the car industry. With their at least semi-commercial free music and loads of variety, this technology is definitely gaining ground. Satellite radio is not only attracting new customers, but it is also attracting many big names. Howard Stern is moving to Sirius satellite radio and many other big names have their own stations. This is definitely a new technology that has a lot of room to grow.

Sirius and XM Satellite Radio Holdings are challenging traditional radio by attracting U.S. listeners with commercial-free music, scores of channels, uninterrupted reception and pre-installed car receivers. Their shares have outperformed those of Clear Channel Communications and Viacom, the two largest U.S. owners of land-based radio stations, which are trying to stem audience and advertising declines by changing formats and adopting digital signals.

Vlogging is the new way to blog. It involves putting video onto blogs. Of course it seems simple, but it is causing a buzz in the world of blogging.

es, that’s vlogging as in Vladivostok, thus creating a neologism even more awkward than blog. On its surface the vlog is simple: adding video to personal Weblog publishing. For now, vlogging remains an embryonic phenomenon with probably less than a few thousand regular practitioners worldwide. But it already raises a raft of interesting issues ranging from intellectual property protection to the future of text on the Web.

The current range of vlog content on the Web varies as widely — perhaps even more widely — than its text counterpart. The oeuvre ranges from some very slickly-produced material (the daily rocketboom.com starring an actress who previously appeared on NBC’s The Restaurant) to a wide range of personal idiosyncrasies: a vlogger eats a grapefruit; video of a 1999 Silicon Valley pool party; a vlogger goes jogging; some guys in L.A. meet for coffee.

Yahoo! has announced a new form of on-the-go news called MyY! Users can now get their news delivered straight to their cell phones.

We just publicly launched a feature on Yahoo! Mobile for users to get their RSS feeds from MyY! on their mobile phone (all wap 2.0 devices). You just go to mobile.yahoo.com on your phone (or access Yahoo from your provider’s menu) and then click on “News” and then “My Headlines.”

I think this is both good and bad. Once again print journalism is being challenged, but internet journalism is now being challenged. This is good; however, for on-the-go patrons of news.

We are in an age of declining media. With this phenomenon happening, citizens have been becoming our new reporters. Bloggers are taking over mass media.

He (Michael Crichton) wrote before all the changes we are witnessing — more viewers watching cable than network, the growth of satellite channels, a dramatic decline of newspaper circulation, the rise of the internet and the proliferation of diverse content, the search engines and the bloggers and the new digital technologies.

“Every Citizen a Reporter”……now thats interesting especially for professional journalists!

With the Internet taking over the world, Internet news has also been growing at full force. This can be bad news for small daily papers, but it can also be bad news for readers. Paying for the news on the Internet may be the next step.

It will take years of experimentation, involving companies of all sizes and vintages, for the news media to refine the new models and settle into a sustainable new structure. No doubt great fortunes will be made or lost in the process. But in the end, I suspect, our industry, like most others, will come to be dominated by a handful of national and super-regional news organizations that can offer readers and advertisers a full range of differently priced news products through a variety of media.

The industry seems to be having to do a complete 360!

The new version of the marketplace of ideas has been showing a strong sense of staying power in today’s media. By this, I mean the Internet. Dalzell referred to this marketplace in his judgement against the CDA. In our new age of journalism where internet news has become very influential, the marketplace or free trade of ideas is growing and expanding to encompass much more. Blogs are one of the newest forms of this free trade of ideas that has shown to have quite an influence in news. Eberhart talks about how influential blogs have become compared to newspapers and how blogs have become more and more popular with internet users.

“You’ll note that several blogs rank higher than mid-size daily newspapers and some are pushing the sites of papers in the top 50 (by daily circulation). The data suggest that the question isn’t “When will blogs arrive?” but rather “Blogs HAVE arrived, what now?”
Some 27 percent of Internet users read blogs, according to the survey, which reports that some eight million US adults say they have created blogs.

With the many blogs and aspects of internet journalism, the definition of a journalist or even journalism has greatly changed. Now, anyone with access to the internet and a way of making a website can become a journalist and many people have taken notice to this. Journalism as especially become even more controversial with the work of blogs that many refer to as the “blogoshere.” With figure heads such as Dan Rather, Eason Jordan, and Jeff Gannon falling victim to weblogs, according to AFP, journalism is changing and so is the marketplace.

First CBS’s Dan Rather, then CNN’s Eason Jordan, Internet bloggers have come of age as media watchdogs with their part in the downfall of these influential, high-profile media heads.

Blogs caused all three men to resign from their positions is some way. Bloggers are actually working as these “media watchdogs”, which changes modern journalism. Regular people or trained journalists can post any information, true or false, and in turn greatly affect someone’s life or position. While anything can be “printed,” anything can also be uncovered which is why bloggers are watchdogs. Bloggers can report on anything and usually report on very specific things that are important to the writers. This is why many of the things posted on Rather, Jordan, and Gannon were even posted.

Mainstream journalists aggressively report only on “acceptable targets” that fit their political beliefs such as “the US military, the Israeli military, the Bush administration and Republicans in general,” wrote Morrisey, reflecting the views of many conservative blogs.

Getting away from the mainstream is the goal of many bloggers. This also helps define the new form of journalism that is seen today. Some would call the ability to post anything as being chaotic or a form of cacophony. But I say that the chaos and cacophony only add to the strength of Internet journalism and the marketplace of ideas. The maketplace of free ideas that is so apparent in Internet journalism is just one more example of the power of the First Amendment. I believe that this speech should not be controlled because although some of it may be controversial, it is still news to someone out there. This is the power of Internet journalism and especially blogs. What someone posts online means something to someone somewhere.

Podcasting is one of the newest and biggest buzzes in Internet technologies. But what is is and how will it affect media?

Quite simply, podcasting is creating an audio file (traditionally in MP3 format, though other formats can be used as well) and making it available online for other people to listen to. If that were all there was to it, you would probably say “So what? That capability has been around for years!” and you would be correct. What’s different now is that there are simple ways to subscribe to specific shows and have the audio files automatically downloaded to your computer and placed into your MP3 software - likely iTunes on the Mac - and, thus, if you wish onto your MP3 player - probably an iPod - without any effort. Simplifying and automating that task has made all the difference.

Some people have criticized podcasts on the grounds that it is far easier and quicker to read a Web page and scan or search for information than it is to download a huge audio file and listen to it to get what the creator is trying to say. That’s true, but it misses the point entirely - podcasting is to weblogs what radio is to newspapers. Podcasting represents a new form of broadcast media. You can think of it as an audio weblog, but podcasts can transcend that description. Perhaps a better analogy is with legalized pirate radio where everyone can have their own station and show.

Audible.com offers a new innovation in books. You can now download novels from the internet to your iPod for much cheaper than buying books on cassette or CD.

Given that everything analog is going digital, it was just a matter of time before you would be able to download audio versions of newspapers and magazines as well as books.

So what’s on my iPod? The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American magazine and Michael Crichton’s novel “Prey.”

I’ve discovered that buying downloadable audio books from Audible.com has now crossed a threshold. It’s easier, cheaper and more convenient than ordering audio cassettes for my car.

You can download a book in a matter of minutes over a high-speed Internet connection and load it onto a handheld music player with ease. There’s no waiting for the audio book package to come in the mail. No worry about your car tape player chewing up the tape. And the selection is growing by 600 hours of available books, speeches and news publications every week.

Great news for iPod users and avid readers….Bad news for the book on tape companies.

Newspaper archives are not quite ready to open up to web users.

Information wants to be free — as long as you don’t have to pay the people who dug up that information. While the Net has long been associated with free things — free e-mail, free personal Web pages, free searches — the news business has been repulsed by the notion that their hard-won scoops and journalism should be given away for free.
But the newspaper business has had little choice but to open its gates online so people can read breaking news for free. How else to compete with free news from CNN.com, NPR.org, Newsweek.com and the plethora of advertising-supported sites? Now, a rising chorus of voices is calling for more: free archives at newspaper sites so that search engine and blogger links will remain live, newspapers can retain their authority in Google and articles can remain part of the online conversation.

Not paying for archives would be great, but I do see how journalists want to charge for their hard work.

Extended search on Google and Yahoo will soon be available.

Google and Yahoo are introducing services that will let users search through television programs based on words spoken on the air. The services will look for keywords in the closed captioning information that is encoded in many programs, mainly as an aid to deaf viewers.

Google’s service, scheduled to be introduced today, does not actually permit people to watch the video on their computers. Instead, it presents them with short excerpts of program transcripts with text matching their search queries and a single image from the program. Google records TV programs for use in the service.

Today, Yahoo will move the video search to its home page. In the next few weeks, it will introduce the ability to search the closed-captioning text for programs from some networks, including Bloomberg and the BBC. Unlike the Google service, Yahoo’s offering will let users watch 60-second video clips.

Harris poll shows that Americans have little trust in media especially compared to Europeans.

Trust in the media

American attitudes toward the press, radio and television were much more negative than European attitudes. Specifically:

A 62 to 22 percent (almost 3-to-1) majority of Americans did not trust “the press”; Europeans were split 47 to 46 percent.
A modest 43 to 33 percent plurality of Americans were inclined to trust the radio; a larger than 2-to-1 majority (62% to 29%) of Europeans did so.
A substantial 58 to 22 percent majority of Americans did not trust television; a 54 to 39 percent majority of Europeans did trust TV.

From a multimedia perspective, this is bad. Future research needs to examine why Americans can’t trust media and develop ways to change this mindset. With most of us making careers in media, we need to think about how we can personally change this as well.

Industry executives want changes to allow for new business opportunities and keep up with the fast pace of the communication marketplace.

The survey results show an overwhelming majority (86%) of the industry believes that updating the nation’s telecommunications laws will open up new business opportunities not possible today under the current rules. The results illustrate that nearly two-thirds (62%) of the industry recognizes that when our telecom laws are updated, consumers will see more innovative products and services. The survey also shows that three-quarters of those polled agree (76%) that all providers, regardless of technology, should be able to compete head-to-head in a free market system without economic regulation.

The United States Telecom Association (USTA) conducted a survey of executives from all segments of the telecom industry, including wireless, wireline, cable, Internet and satellite providers, to check the pulse of key decision-makers on their views for the future of communications. Respondents included equipment manufacturers, competitive access providers, integrated communications providers and local exchange carriers.

“Industry leaders understand that while technology and innovation have dramatically changed how we communicate, but the rules have not kept pace,” explained USTA President and CEO Walter B. McCormick Jr. “The results of this survey are clear. The industry has spoken and now it’s time for policy makers to act to bring innovation, investment and market-driven competition to telecom.”

I agree with this survey. Its hard to keep up with technology, but changes in laws and rules would help greatly. This will allow for more competition and more services for consumers. The changes that the USTA wants will greatly affect media since it involves all forms of telecommunications. This could be one giant leap for media!

New online feature introduces daily newspapers into a new trend.

The News & Record’s proposed changes include ways for readers to discuss issues online, more interaction between readers and reporters, and in a dramatic break from a newspaper’s gatekeeper role, even opportunities for readers to submit stories of their own for Web publication.

This will be great especially for small newspapers with little money to pay reporters. Plus, young writers like myself could get some experience writing. Also, it’s always good to give feedback and this feature gives readers that option.