Paranoia Will Destroy Ya

In a world where the average person has become wary of the power of the media that surrounds them, it's nice to know that our major news outlets still feel like they're being marginalized . . .

According to an article by Freepress.net, some of Chicago's major news outlets (most notably, the Chicago Tribune) have expressed their discontent that the Internet has taken away a larger portion of their audience, and therefore, they believe they should have even fewer rules and regulations controlling their output. The Tribune became so concerned with this, in fact, that they even complained to the FCC last October claiming that their competition was currently "fierce". This "competition", they claimed, was mostly on the Internet with Web sites like Chicago Ray and Gapers Block being named as top rivals.

Still, studies show that companies like the Tribune (which also owns WGN-TV, WGN-AM, cable news channel CLTV and Chicago Magazine along with its newspaper) are still dominating the market. One particular study done by Free Press writers Adam Lynn and S. Derek Turner shows that:

* The independent Chicago-specific websites do not publish appreciable amount of original local news content.
* Close to 60 percent of the stories in our sample of Chicago-specific websites were on nonhard
news topics such as sports and entertainment.
* Only 13.7 percent of the stories in our sample of Chicago-specific websites contained
original reporting. But the bulk of these stories were on soft-news topics, such as concert
and restaurant reviews.
* In total, only 5.5 percent of the stories in our sample of Chicago-specific websites
contained original reporting on hard news topics such as crime, local governance,
education and local politics.
* More than half of the stories on “hard” news topics linked to stories on Web sites owned
by traditional media.

When examining the number of hits that these independent sites received, the study came up with about 14,000 per month whereas any of the major news sources have numbers coming in that are "80 times as large". While it's true that many people do not use the major media as much as they once did, it's a fact that these sources are still the most trusted names out there, providing us all with the hard news that we deem the most important. If these major outlets are looking to maintain our trust, they will not get it by staying paranoid and looking for recourses to have fewer restrictions. Instead of focusing on the growing number of "professional" bloggers and independent sources, they should instead focus on their own content and work to retrieve the trust that has been lost between them and their consumers.