Do blogs represent the end of newspapers?

Last week Trevor Butterworth in The Financial Times Magazine questioned the future of blogging. He created a blog, where many started to comment on what blogging means to them.

Is the established media more credible than information on blogs? Certainly in the UK there are papers which spin a story. There also appear to be bounds of acceptability. For example the government can apply pressure on the BBC. I'm not saying this does occur but it can--- I'm still not sure what the argument with the government over the war in Iraq for instance was all about. To some it appeared to be the government setting the agenda because it could. Sometimes I think the media feel that they are more credible than anyone else. Where does this leave the libel laws?

There are definitely benefits to having established media. Blogs may represent the rise of global communities. For example Reporters without borders have an interesting handbook for want-to-be reporters. I think this is a more realistic view of the technology.
People are organising their own communities, reporters are just one group. Peer-to-peer information sharing is more effective than hierarchies, although it creates political problems with undesirable subcultures. In this respect the world has changed.

The belief that papers might disappear is down to a misunderstanding of the diversity of readership--- perhaps even a tendency of media to commoditize their readership, or a need to stratify society into classes. Isn’t most of society actually heterarchical rather than hierarchical? My impression that self-organising teams are becoming more prevent in manufacturing and software, with promises of mutual respect and collaboration. I think it’s worth perusing, despite being idealist. Web2.0 is quite apt in that the invention of the browser for instance took a good five years or so to be generally accepted as useful; mostly it was down to content.

I don’t think the .com was hype. How could you argue with the growth in online retailing? The results of the .com era have changed economics. Hype was inflated stock prices and P/E ratios meaning that companies would have to grow an impractical amount. Technology is not resposible for this, neither were the pioneers; only people entering the market with little understanding of what they were buying into. Information Technology is delivering social change globally; it is pragmatic to be cautious and patient, but not dismissive. I think the rise of India, Brazil and China has been partly down to Information Technology. Recently I’ve worked with engineers from Bangalore and found much reading material we've shared. The internet is bringing about globalisation in software, for better or for worse.