The Death of ________ Media

Sunday's New York Times featured a story that made the rounds yesterday. The headline reads:

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter

Wow, I guess I should stop blogging, because no one is going to read it anymore.

Well, like many other death notices proclaiming the end of __________ media, this one is wrong too.

Last century it was predicted that radio would disappear because of television. (Radio with pictures).

Television was also supposed to kill the movie industry.

Cable television was supposed to kill the broadcast television industry.

The internet was supposed to kill the newspaper business and phone book industries.

That last one (phone books) might happen in the next 10 years.

What really determines if a media lives or dies is money.

Yep. Cash.

Radio, television, newspapers, generally speaking have survived by changing with the times and adjusting their operations to keep positive cash flow. Not all, but many.

But this particular newspaper story doesn't really support the attention getting headline.

Quotes from the story:

Like any aspiring filmmaker, Michael McDonald, a high school senior, used a blog to show off his videos. But discouraged by how few people bothered to visit, he instead started posting his clips on Facebook, where his friends were sure to see and comment on his editing skills...

“I don’t use my blog anymore,” said Mr. McDonald, who lives in San Francisco. “All the people I’m trying to reach are on Facebook.”

Blogs were once the outlet of choice for people who wanted to express themselves online. But with the rise of sites like Facebook and Twitter, they are losing their allure for many people — particularly the younger generation.

Stop. The younger generation? Teens? Teenagers never dominated the blog world. Skip down a couple of paragraphs and the real story comes out...

...small talk shifted in large part to social networking, said Elisa Camahort Page, co-founder of BlogHer, a women’s blog network. Still, blogs remain a home of more meaty discussions, she said.

“If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”

Lee Rainie, director of the Internet and American Life Project, says that blogging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.

“The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.”

Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes the WordPress blogging software, explains that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking.

In any case, he said bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary.

“There is a lot of fragmentation,” Mr. Schneider said. “But at this point, anyone who is taking blogging seriously — they’re using several mediums to get a large amount of their traffic.”

While the younger generation is losing interest in blogging, people approaching middle age and older are sticking with it. Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.

It takes a certain level of maturity to be a blogger and stick with it. It's not for everyone, but that's okay. You can always play your Farmville games on Facebook.

So, if you hear a prediction or "death notice" about social media, or some form of social media, read the whole story before you join the mourners. Click here to read the NYT story.