Yes, the AP (Associated Press) is desperate. Yes, the AP has lost control of the news. And yes, bloggers are more and more going local with their focus. That leads to an obvious question, will bloggers eventually replace the AP and other news organizations?
Wall Street Journal columnist Mark Penn points to statistics which claim that in the U.S. alone there are over 20 million bloggers, of which 1.7 million get paid for it. Mr. Penn also references a Technorati report which says that there are close to a half million bloggers receiving there primary income from this activity.
I don’t necessarily buy into these exact numbers but clearly there is an important game changing trend at work here. With likely millions of bloggers worldwide and many making their living blogging it’s only a matter of time that all news is covered in blogs.
The current problem with blogs is not unprofessionalism as many in journalism will tell you, its a lack of central distribution channels. The local court house in your community may have blogger coverage but do you know about it? New restaurants open in your area all the time and bloggers are reviewing them, but are you reading? Your high school won their basketball game last night and it was covered by 2 blogs, 4 twitterers and one Facebook post, but did you notice?
The challenge for us Internet entrepreneurs is how to bring this coverage to peoples attention. News aggregation sites and search engines are working at it but they have not yet succeeded at replacing the local newspaper. However, once real-time local news which is covered by hundreds of local bloggers, Twitterers, Facebookers, YouTubers, etc… can be integrated into high-traffic websites then who needs the AP!
