Hinchey's bill to break up media conglomerates and reinstate the Fairness Doctrine :)

Hinchey... posed a challenge to members of Congress to pass media reform, asking, “Will we be strong enough to bear this responsibility?”

owners are committing suicide by concentrating the number of journalists who report the news.

Quite a few journalists have left their conventional news outlets to the new world of weblogs

I have read several essays by Jay Rosen who believes the future is not in conventional reporting. Good journalists, like anyone else, who are good at their craft when it has been reduced to very few owners, become so frustrated that they seek avenues that are new. I.e. people go into business for themselves when the job market presents little opportunity. Ownership is now held by such a small number of hands, that they are causing their own demise. Interestingly, Jay speaks about going open source. That seems to be the trend Internet technology is going. The network of the future forsees people and computers linked together to form one giant flow of information. Computers will be networked, utilizing each other's storage devices. That will be a worldwide phenomena so I have read.

Jay believes change has come from the audience it once served. Concentrated ownership has had the effect of opening the market up to unconventional sources. (Seeing more opinions than what editors feel should be published, gives readers more information.) The future of journalism has taken a fork in the road that wasn't known to be there. I'm just thrilled that I was here to see the beginning of the change.

Who would have imagined the day that education of the masses made these upstarts so well versed that they would reject not having a voice of their own. L0L

and only one subject: politics -

and one action- what President Bush does or does not do -

so it drives me nuts not just ideologically but as a NY-er.

The downside of all this &internet addiction & cellphones in the street etc is:

we do not know our neighbors and are afraid of them. Then we wonder why we feel isolated.

_{"at some point I'm hopeful I'll figure out something to put here"}

The fall of the mainstream press in print is for two main reasons. 1) The internet revolution (and thanks to all at Agonist for doing your part:) and 2) People are getting so sick of all that corporate flavor.

That Washington and New York dominate the media outlets shouldn't surprise anyone. It's been this way for years. Thirty years ago I had the chance to work in both Washington and New York within a few years of each stint and the whiff of being at the center of the empire existed in both places. Only the tang in the air differed a little from the one city when compared to the other. Much like one would experience when moving from an exotic island specializing in cinnamon to another committed to nutmeg.

What the big corporate media outlets have done is cull the herd in a short period of time, enabling all of the little beasties to come out of hiding to eat the young of the corporate behemoths. The corporate dinosaurs got rid of all of the mid-size media outlets which served to keep the tiny operations in check. Just like the real dinosaurs, they'll likely rue the day they decided to overconcentrate. I'm sure it looked like a good idea at the time. As in the finance industry, technology is allowing disintermediation of the sources directly to the consumers for news media.