Both professionals and average citizens have shown that Americans aren't ready to give up their daily newspapers. Instead of newspapers and older media being destroyed by the internet, existing formats and emerging Internet tools will start melding together, all for the benefit of the reading public, experts say. (Video By John Lazarz)

The growth of free online media has been both a dream come true and a nightmare realized for the world of journalism. The benefits of up-to-the-minute coverage for regular citizens are incalculable, but those same benefits are the new problems journalism faces in the online century. 

Sources of news are no longer limited to a few television networks, national papers, and a diverse group of regional and local papers. Now, anyone with a camera, a computer, and some confidence can put together a story and publish it. This means an individual has the ability to scoop a multi-billion dollar industry with thousands of full time employees.

The problem with this is that if there were no networks and all news was delivered via blog or tweet, the substance and reputation of journalism would suffer immeasurably. The good news is this isn’t going to happen. In an interview at a NYC Starbucks, Marni Goltsman, web producer of The Paley Center for Media, noted that, “You’re not buying the content itself, you’re buying the experience of what the content is.” Without real content somewhere, web surfers will move on to a place where they can get it. This will be the saving grace for traditional news media.

The far more pressing problem for journalism is a source of revenue. With double-digit losses over the last four years, newspapers would appear to be a dying breed. Yet appearances can be deceiving. According to the blog of former editor Robert Niles, while online revenue is nowhere near matching the previous stream, “So long as a publisher builds an audience, it will have the ability to rent access to it to advertisers.”

Its not a shining future for journalism, but rather a messy evolutionary storm that will pass, in time.

This is the individual final project for Prof. Mo Krochmal's JRNL 10 (Journalism Tools) class for Spring 2010. 

John Lazarz worked as a volunteer at the 2010 New York 140 Conference.