Hot off the press. Traditional media still king.

According to the 2009 State of the First Amendment Survey, most Americans prefer getting their news from traditional media.   In a recent press release, Gene Policinski, vice president and executive director of the First Amendment Center said,

“…while new forms of obtaining information, including Twitter and social media are much discussed and growing in use, most Americans continue to rely on the same news organizations — including the news reports picked up by online news providers — on which they have relied for decades.”

This is not surprising since the majority of overall advertising budgets are still spent on traditional media, and only a fraction goes to new media. Wherever the most eyeballs go, so goes the budgets. But that small fraction continues to expand and will continue to grow as more people turn to the Internet for their information and entertainment needs. Some traditional media outlets have radically changed their models and have incorporated digital strategies like social media and blogging as part of their news network and are working with bloggers and tweeters to better take advantage of the digital frontier. However, some media sources, like AP News, are trying to regulate their content by putting forth strict guidelines designed to control how their stories are spread across the Internet. Last year, popular site TechCrunch announced it would ban articles and information coming from AP news in response to actions taken by AP News against a popular news aggregate which used their content without permission. More recently, TechCrunch wrote an interesting article titled,  “Behind The A.P.’s Plan To Become The Web’s News Cop”.  Also, in a recent ibrandcasting post, I wrote about popular bloggers in Germany who released a manifesto that appears to directly challenge traditional news outlets like AP News and promotes the free flow of information. The role of traditional media in the digital landscape is still a bit blurry. Whether traditional media embraces new technology or tries to mold it as they see fit, one thing is for sure; in the card game of news, traditional media still holds a pretty decent hand.