Mandel: Journalism heading into a golden age

While the need for reporting, editing and analysis will be acute, that doesn't mean the need will be filled.

A hundred million women in the US claim to "need" a diet that works, but even if one existed, they'd never be able to find it, given all the magazines that have a new diet in every issue, and at least three diets in the pipeline before the current issue hits the stand.

Gresham's Law says "Bad money drives out good" and in an information economy, information is money.

Yes, we'll have to say what Mike says about that. The two examples that come to mind for me are health and political leadership. We have an acute need for excellence in both, and yet the free-market system provides at best very uneven results. With journalism, we have a need for strong investigative reporting. But it's unclear what in the evolving business model will provide it.

There's no doubt, there will be many deaths during the Internet Revolution. However, while we are seeing major layoffs, there are very few newspapers and magazines that have folded.

Now more than ever, we the people, need professional journalists, editors and publications. However, we do not need the quantity that is available.

So, pubs like Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune should merge. Weeklies like Newsweek and Time, join forces. Newspapers: come on, we need a few national publications that offer local news. We already have NY Times, Washington Post and USA Today.

Come on folks, consolidate and continue to deliver high quality news. Currently, you're continuing the "fight". However, the quality is suffering.

think about it...statistically, you now have a much greater capability to reach more sets of eyes/ears/minds than ever before....you also have more technology to deliver info in the preferred form, written/verbal/visual...

so, in my mind, journalism will be more prevalent than ever...and the corp that delivers the best content in the best manner will win...

the trick will be understanding what the consumer wants and how they want it delivered...also, understanding emerging technologies and how they can be used to deliver content...

There's going to be lots of winners- one for every constiuency or group of common interests. With the internet, that's a lot of groups and a splintered reading public. The only way that I can see to reach more than a focused few is to consistently write to basics that many differentiated readers can grasp. It takes a professional to do that. I would doubt that a professional journalist that had just come out of a ten year coma would recognize anything, though.