Here is one writer’s take on the subject of mainstream journalism vs new media jornalism.

The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn’t use to be.

One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey.

Another is information originally published in other media—everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods—which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites.

Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don’t have jobs with news organizations.

According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism.

That would add up to more than four million newly minted journalists just among the ranks of American bloggers. If you add everyone abroad, and everyone who practices other forms of Web journalism, the profession must have increased in size a thousandfold over the last decade.

When mainstream journalists speak of bloggers they tend to dismiss them as amateurs and disregard the importance of blogging to news in general. It’s really too bad they did not embrace it right away because new media journalists and bloggers are here to stay.

More and more people are getting their news from sources outside of mainstream media. Whether the so-called traditional journalists think these writers and news gatherers are amateur or not doesn’t matter. The fact is traditional news sources are losing readers and don’t know how to stop the bleeding and online news sources and blogs are gaining readers in record numbers.

Traditional journalists got lazy. There are resources online to check facts and gather information at a touch of the mouse button. Anyone can write an informed post if they do a few minutes of research. And many bloggers have become well-known for reliability due to this fact.

New Media VS Traditional Media isn’t even a contest. As corporations buy up more and more newspapers, limiting the number of different sources for your daily news, more people will turn to the rich diversity of news that can be found online.

New Media 12 Million. Traditional Media 0