Gary Goldhammer has written a great post on Social Media Today (flagged up to me today on Twitter by Lee Odden (thanks Lee - follow him if you're not already - @leeodden).

Gary poses some interesting thoughts on the debate around the decline in traditional media and the rise of Google and other online news aggregators. The thrust of the piece is that we can not rely on news aggregators and search engines alone to provide our news.  We need journalists, editors and the media to uncover the content that we don't know about, AND the content that we don't know that we may even be interested in reading.

Think about that - how do you search Google News for those articles that you enjoy reading, on subjects that interest you but that you don't know exist?!

As Gary says:

"There are search engines that learn from us (Google) and search engines that teach us (Journalists). We need both, and neither should diminish at the expense of the other. But what if you don’t know what you want until you see it? It’s great to have search that understands me, but I want a search that teaches me. I want serendipity...Computers learn, people teach --and this is where journalism and the printed word can still lead.

"Those “intelligent agents” we all wanted? They are called reporter and editors. They are magazines, newspapers and, yes, books... These are the search agents that advance us and force us to confront what we didn’t think we needed or wanted to know. It doesn’t matter how well a search engine learns to learn if, in the end, it teaches us nothing."

It's a great and well written post so go and take a look at it for yourselves here.