With almost 9,000 job losses in the US print media this year, Kerry said he believes that “paper and ink have become obsolete, eclipsed by the power, efficiency and technological elegance of the Internet”. Taking part in the hearing were Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington, top executives from Google, and CEO of journalism support organisation The Knight Foundation, Alberto Ibarguen.

“High-end journalism is dying in America and unless a new economic model is achieved it will not be reborn on the Web or anywhere else,” said David Simon (former Baltimore Sun reporter and scriptwriter) who was also present at the hearing.

This seems to be another step, albeit a small one, towards the merging of blogging and formal journalism.

Blogger Erica Smith has created a visual representation of the number of job losses and paper closures on her blog, Paper Cuts. The numbers range from small regional papers laying off 10 employees or less, to larger publications like the Miami Herald, which made 175 employees redundant last month.

Smith uses a google-map style image to show job losses

Smith has posted about almost 9000 job losses in US print media in this year alone. However, many of these papers are not shutting down entirely, but instead moving their entire output online.

English researchers said last month that switching to online output should only be considered as “a last resort”, and this is the case for many US papers. However perhaps this move could be used as a positive development by these papers. Online distribution could work in the favour of some papers who no longer have the funds to continue in print.

However Google news has   been criticised as just another step in Google’s attempt to monopolise every industry it can. Although Google is not a news site, and though it produces no notable journalism, it has managed to become a destination for news readers worldwide.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said last month that he believed that newspapers should embrace online journalism (and Google’s efforts to organise it), rather than fighting against it.

“It’s obvious to me that the majority of the circulation of a newspaper should be online, rather than printed. There should be five times, 10 times more circulation because there’s no distribution cost.”

Trudi McDonald addressed the Google News friend-or-foe argument recently, and mentioned that many regional papers rely on it for a large chunk of their online readership.

Google’s stance on the matter is that Google News is getting news out there that wouldn’t be read otherwise. But does this mean that Google is being credited for news stories that they didn’t write, simply because the story is now more easily accessible?

The Guardian has already began to expand the video feeds on their site. Now a reader can watch videos that aren’t just short tv news-style bulletins. They can watch longer documentary-style videos, like this one about wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice.

However, another, even more innovative (but slightly less informative?) news resource has been adopted by some news organisations. MtvU recently launched a game called Darfur is Dying, which Patrick Kavanagh profiled on his blog.

Although computer games like this have a limited audience among readers, they will catch this attention of younger readers in a way that news videos can’t. Perhaps this is exactly the kind of future-focused thinking that is needed by news organisations.

There is still a place for journalism degree courses, but only if  these courses can be adapted to suit changing media. The DCU journalism course is indeed adapting- a new Digital Media module will be taught to incoming first years this September, along with a new practical media skills module.

Although the Wall St Journal says that the majority of bloggers cannot expect to make more than a few hundred dollars from their ventures into the blogosphere, it does note that “for sites at the top, the returns can be substantial”. “Substantial” can mean anything from $75,000 to $200,000 per annum.

Screenshot of US news blog The Huffington Post, the financial value of which will soon “no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post”, says the WSJ online

Of course, this kind of income is only available if a blogger is willing to “hire” themself out to companies looking for advertising space. The WSJ acknowledges that this kind of profit-fuelled blogging can promote sensationalist journalism- doing whatever it takes to get hits on your blog. But if broadsheet papers have managed, for the most part, to escape the temptation of publishing sensationalist news, then surely any dedicated news blogger can resist too.

The guidelines are brief but informed. Writers are encouraged to “be meticulous”, “avoid hearsay”, “omit irrelevant opinion” and to “stick to the facts”.

In terms of defamation law in Ireland, blogging is usually treated in almost the same way as print journalism. Because of this, citizen journalism is in need of a list of publishing standards, and a list drawn up by an already established news blogging site like Huffington Post is probably a good place to start.

The research was mainly based on the revenue and costs of Finnish newspaper Taloussanomat, which stopped distributing print editions of its a product in December 2007, due to financial problems. It was hoped that the lower costs of online-only publication would be enough to pull the paper out of financial difficulty. Although the paper’s overhead costs reduced by half after the switch, its online readership declined by 22% and its revenues dropped by over 75%.

In order for a switch to online-online publication to be successful, a company has to be aware that the internet is “a different medium that is used in a different way”, said one of the researchers, Neil Thurman.

Online journalism can survive in the future without government aid, just as it is doing now. Cameron referred to figures from the Pew research Centre that said 55% percent of Internet users went online for their news in 2008, up 20% form 1998. “If  this trend continues, 75 percent of Internet users could be reading online news by 2018″, said Cameron.

Picture from here