Why Mainstream Media Is Losing Its Audience

It is good to see others beginning to actual explain in a more cohesive manner why the Main Stream Media (MSM) are a bunch of tools. I just ranted about the ridiculous media coverage of the Paris Hilton in jail, out of jail, back to jail story over at Whits Place. It is amazing that there is no longer any news in the news, and they are just of touch of what the public really wants from the media. You would think with so many options out there, that one of them would be able to figure this out. What do you think?

Here is the article by BL Ochman from MarketingProfs:Daily Fix

The roll of pet-owning bloggers who "turned themselves into a news and information collection and dissemination machine" to report on the pet food recall debacle is a clear indicator of why mainstream media (MSM) is losing readers to the Internet in droves. MSM just doesn't understand what people really care about.

USA Today's Elizabeth Weise reports on the mobilization of pet owners by a dedicated group of bloggers including Pet Connection who jumped in when mainstream media reports proved sketchy, scattered, wrong, or, in many cases, non-existent.

Blogs written by pet owners assembled information sources that drew millions of readers, and most of the bloggers are unpaid. That's because most of us, including me, blog because we love to learn and share information -- especially when it affects members of our family, like our pets.

Considering that 56% of U.S. households own pets, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association, it continues to astound me that MSM didn't think the story important enough to cover.

Weise says bloggers sometimes stated tips as the truth, leaving journalists to track them down and disprove them. She also should have noted that a large percentage of those tips were correct and that the only place to find them often was in blogs because MSM never reported most of the details.

For example, Pet Connection live-blogged and ran transcripts of the FDA press
conferences where the recall was discussed. Those reports never made it to ainstream media websites, and of they certainly weren't in any print outlets.

All in all, it was "crowd sourcing" at its finest, says Paul Grabowicz, director of the New Media Program at the University of California at Berkeley.

"It's heartening to see that people did it," he says.