Online for everything?

By Kallie Bonnell, Marketing Coordinator, Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP

Anyone who follows the news has seen newspapers themselves making headlines and not in the positive-press way. Every week another paper is announcing cut backs, salary reductions, and in the worst cases bankruptcy.

However, print news media is not the only medium losing traction to the Web and online sources.  The February numbers for online video streaming are beginning to show the same trends that online news exhibited many, many months ago. Hulu for example grew its viewership by 42% and streaming by 33% and according to Neilson is the second largest video streamer in the U.S.

Yesterday, @comScore released findings on the demographics of Twitter, a digital network that is being touted as the fastest breaking news medium on the Web today. Who is using Twitter to monitor the content of live conversation - the demographics are a little shocking. ComScore cites 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

Speculation and rumors of Google purchasing Twitter, to increase the availability of “real time” search, ran rampant in the past week.  Regardless of whether the M&A comes to fruition, you can bet Google is figuring out a way to get its share of the “live search” action.

Point being, with live search becoming a reality, online news replacing the traditional print version plus eliminating the antiquated idea of a news cycle, and broadcast being moved to video streaming, are major broadcast corps the next to be affected by attrition and possibly demise in the marketplace? Will the broadcast world find a way to adapt?