Reflection #5

Week 6 Reflection:

Article “Will NPR's podcasts birth a new business model for public radio?” from Online Journalism Review (29 Nov 2005) http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/051129glaser/

This article showed how NPR became a leading podcaster in just two months. I like the idea that NPR listened to the "people" because they wanted it, they got it. Because the public demanded portable audio, NPR birthed a new busniess model for public radio.

Podcast listeners like shorter content and the original content. Personally, I have no experience with podcasting and I am pretty resistant to change so I am going to continue to have no podcasting experience for a while... :) Hehe

I think the same type of business model can be applied to blogging technology/print media as we see in the second article:

Chapter 1, "From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond" from We the Media by Dan Gillmor (2004)

As we learned in class last week, monopolies are illegal. "The economics of newspaper publishing favored bigness, and local monopolies came about because, in most communities,
readers would support only one daily newspaper of any size." Those monopolies no longer exist. I also think blogging is breaking down journalistic hegemony.

Acccording to the article, "Newsrooms are becoming more diverse. Major media companies have launched or bought popular ethnic publications and broadcasters. But independent ethnic media has continued to grow in size, quality, and credibility: grassroots journalism ascendant."

Open sourcing the news has and continues to transform the industry. Our blogs that we are doing in this class are contributing to the "blogosphere." :)