Frontline Response:

Frontline exposes journalism trends, particularly in televelision and the internet news industry. Part 3 brings to light the deterioration of hard news on television programs and the move towards entertainment due to profit incentives. It also highlighted the growing popoularity or programs like Jon Stewart which satirizes and mocks today's news sources.Jon Stewart is targeting the youth of America and is presenting news in a creative and humourous manner.
Programs like 60 minutes whose audience continues to get older has partnered with Yahoo to put the program on-line. Many news programs also have on-line blogs from their main anchors such as Katie Courics' Journal segment on-line. There are also more informal and low budget news productions on-line that receive 400,000-1,000,000 visitors a day. These bloggers and citizen journalists operate without journalistic training which can be somewhat controversial, yet they are still presenting valuable news and are "hitting the pavement." Sometimes the determination of young journalists to uncover true news and considering that they are free of advertising pressures can make thier reporting refreshing.
Google and other major on-line news providers pick up stories that newspaper journalists have originally written, such as stories from the AP wire and then provide them to an internet audience. This is controversial because newspaper sales are down becuase the stories are on the internet but the stories are from newspaper journalists. Google has made the decision not to write thier own news, rather just present it to the public. This causes me to question whether google is paying for this news and buying it off the wire? Or merely recycling news. It only seems ethical that these journalists would be paid for the news they are uncovering and writing becuase they are doing the grunt work.
The newspaper industry's financial trajectory is gloomy, as highlighted by Frontline's feature of the LA Times. Newspaper stocks are down because journalistic trends are going more and more toward the internet medium. Advertisers and readers are moving toward the internet. Investors are also skeptical so stock prices are down. Even original news outlets on TV are being challenged by programs like Jon Stewart and Colbert report. The news trend is one of change, and the question is who can keep up and adapt?
Craiglist is also taking classified ad revenue from newspapers because it is free to post there. This has affected the economics of newspapers. Interestingly enough newspaper consumption has increased but newspaper sales are down. But newspapers are the content providers so if they are threatened google and these other newspaper providers will not have content.