It’s clear to see that the media landscape has changed. Print news, in a lot of places, is dying.  For example, the local paper here is basically being given away (for example, I was given a year’s free subscription to the paper for free and, at my wife’s school, they were throwing away 60+ papers a day, until she started recycling them.  I presume this was to keep the circulation numbers up). This is because more people are reading news online and, in a lot of cases, bypassing the sites of newspapers for blogs that, in a number of instances, are weeks ahead of traditional media outlets in covering and addressing important issues.

Now, broadcast news is also taking a hit.  In fact, it has been predicted that, within 5 years, online news and information sources will bypass TV news in popularity.

It’s not hard to see why.  How many of us want to have to sit through Paris Hilton stories ad nauseum?  Online news actually offers a sort of a la carte experience by allowing the user to take in those things that interest them instead of having someone decide for them what should interest them. Furthermore, how many times, especially in the past few years, have we been frustrated to find out that the traditional media outlets failed to really analyze important issues (i.e. the lead-up to the Iraq War and domestic spying)?  We have been left wanting. So, it should be no surprise to see the following:

Looking five years down the road, the poll points to significant increases in all geographies for online news and information, and significant parallel losses for television network news, with modest increases for cable news, and newspapers down from moderately to significantly in all countries surveyed. Radio remains relevant, with moderate decreases.

Consumers said the top three things editors can do to make their services more attractive are to cover more local news and information, improve journalistic quality and provide more in-depth analysis of world events.

Many consumers claimed today’s news has too biased or narrow a viewpoint, and suffers in the quality of writing and analysis.

Now, what does this mean for us?

We can’t afford to suffer under the B.E.T. paradigm in the age of new media. We should be creating a variety of offerings that appeal to the tastes of as many black folks as possible.  So, we could be creating complementary and competitive offerings for the black media consumer.  So, we could still see fluff like B.E.T. but, we could also have more news and opinion, or even investigative journalism that addresses our concerns.

In other words, we can’t let this opportunity pass us by.  The media landscape is, again, changing.  So, when are you staking your claim?

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