The Impact of Blogs on Online Media Companies

Jeff Jarvis provides an outstanding overview of the impact of "citizens journalism" on established media companies. His key points for Internet investors:

• Thanks to the internet - and the consumer control and choice it enables - the mass market is dying, replaced by a mass of niches...
• All established news media face strong new competition for audience, attention, and ad dollars from the internet, cable, satellite radio and TV, and games.
• All established news media face growing competition for stories and attention from new sources of news, led by citizens' media. These new competitors can serve niche markets large media cannot serve.
• The value of controlling distribution - printing presses, broadcast towers, cables - is torn apart by the internet. The internet is the network no one owns.
• Thus… In the old days, if you wanted to publish or broadcast, you had to have expensive equipment and expertise; you had to know the guy who owned the means of distribution (printing press or broadcast tower or cable); you had to have a fortune for marketing. Now, anyone can create content (and, better yet, conversation) and do it inexpensively with new equipment and tools; they can distribute it online and they can "market" it (that is, it can be found) thanks to search, links, and the metadata they create. All this levels the playing field. As Jay Rosen says: "A blog, you see, is a little First Amendment machine."
• Google is a brand killer. People find what they want from any source and don't credit or remember the source.

The entire piece is worth reading.

Stock implications: I've argued that these trends threaten companies like CNET and TSCM, and arguably also YHOO. For more analysis of the impact on media companies, see Seeking Alpha's coverage of the Long Tail.

Full disclosure: at the time of writing I'm short CNET and TSCM.