Indie 2.0

Check out this interesting article in today’s International Herald Tribune, on how a protest (against import to South Korea of perceived un-safe U.S. beef) initially ignored by traditional media, snowballed after being covered by citizen journalists on Web 2.0 sites.

This article dovetails with another article on Wired (“Media Death March: Newspaper Ads Tumble”) reporting that newspaper ad sales fell 14% in the first quarter of 2008 in the U.S.–further proof that Nicolas Carr’s predictions about newspapers ‘unbundling’ is correct. What’s going on in Korea shows that traditional newspapers only accelerate their demise by refusing to report on grassroots protests as “un-newsworthy”. And, btw, I think the demise of traditional newspapers will mean the end of excellent investigative journalism, and this is a bad thing (see this previous post).