Bloggasm

With the doom and gloom storm clouds gathering, we’ve seen news article after article about layoffs in major newspaper companies. But we also see little trickles of information that local newspapers are doing well–actually increasing in ad sales.

So it has been interesting to see the debate as to how the journalism job market is doing. Mediashift has an in-depth discussion on the topic, followed by a rebuttal by Rough Type, followed by a counter-rebuttal from Mediashift.

Verdict? Journalism jobs are decreasing, but at a slower rate than perhaps we originally thought.

What the articles fail to point out is the increase in full-time bloggers. I would say that there are now more than 1,000 bloggers out there who make a full-time living–whether it’s through adsense or some other form of online advertising. If you combine this with the new digital jobs at more traditional forms of media, then perhaps you’ll see an even more healthy job market.

This is pretty cool. Boingboing, arguably the most popular blog out there, has done a major revamp on their site. They’ve re-added their comments section, redesigned the entire blog, and also added a gadget blog.

I wonder if this will eventually increase their competition against huge gadget sites like Engadget and Gizmodo. In fact, their gadget blogger is a former Gizmodo editor.

Unlike others, I don’t always subscribe to alarmist statistics like this AP poll that found 1 in 4 adults didn’t read a book last year. So? Many of them are interacting with other kinds of media. My brother hardly ever reads books, and yet he reads over a dozen newspaper and magazine articles a day. He has a definite interest in reading, just not in book form.

via ed

In terms of media coverage, social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook and video sites like Youtube get all the press. But according to research and analysis company Parks Associates, online gaming is growing at a much quicker rate.

Now that Murdoch has successfully taken over WSJ, there’s a debate now whether he’ll open the gates to wsj.com, which is currently one of the only successful online subscription sites. Many bloggers, of course, think that the pay wall should be lifted. But I was surprised to see that MediaShift came up with a list of very good reasons to keep the pay wall intact.

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Related posts:
1. Murdoch successful in buying Dow Jones

There is no shortage of articles that point out the decline of advertising dollars at newspapers, but few of these articles try to break down the numbers into the specific costs of the company. Though this article makes some broad-based assumptions and logic jumps, it attempts to show how a newspaper like the New York Times won’t be able to sustain itself as online ads transfer online.

via mediashift

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Related posts:
1. The difficulty of internet metrics
2. Buy comment spam
3. Some media and journalism related links from NY Times

Second quarter numbers are in, and it looks like the Post’s revenues have dropped 13%. They’re likely being eaten away by thousands of little blogs like mine that make money from adsense. Separately, we make very little, but combined I’m sure we add up to a hefty sum.