Is the quality of news and journalism available suffering from the unstoppable shift of media consumption away from traditional sources? Newspaper readerships are in decline, despite overall media consumption going up, as more consumption takes place online. The stampede away from newspapers seems inevitable, however, this does not need to mean the demise of good journalism.

Eric Alterman writing for The New Yorker offered many arguments suggesting that consumer generated media (CGM) is chipping away at journalistic standards, together with plenty of evidence suggesting that this need not be the case. Tim Lee of Ars Technica asserted that the online technology press already lead the way for quality online reporting.

According to Alterman's research:

"A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago. “Less than one in five believe what they read in print,” the 2007 “State of the News Media” report, issued by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, concluded. “CNN is not really more trusted than Fox, or ABC than NBC. The local paper is not viewed much differently than the New York Times.”

So people don't consume MSM as much as they used to and they don't trust it as much either. Media moguls don't necessarily agree on the best means of tackling this. Rupert Murdoch stated that today’s consumers:

“want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened. And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community — to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways.”

Today's consumer wants to take part, though the Chicago Tribune doesn't agree, having closed the comments boards for all political stories on its website because “the boards were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.” That might just have to be a price worth paying for newspaper companies to stay alive. Advertisers will increasingly put their dollar online to follow the eyeballs and as this happens, MSM will follow, together with the best journalists.

The majority of CGM is never going to be of the quality of traditional, well researched journalism, simply because it serves a different purpose. There will be a differentiation between people talking to their friends and those talking authoritatively and it is likely that those with most authority will well connected in the MSM.