Will Journalism Survive the Onslaught Brought on by the Internet?

Yesterday, paidContent.org discussed how government intervention may be part of the strategy to save news reporting. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) takes on that question today in their workshop From Town Criers to Bloggers: How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age? . You can follow the workshop on Twitter (#ftcnews).

While journalism may or may not survive the next 5 years, journalists will flourish. For years now Google has been telling us that when it comes to internet marketing, content is king. Of course, as an SEO company, we have always known that unique, newsworthy content will drive traffic and links. So we work with clients to produce a consistent content strategy in order to produce larger websites based on our keyword research and content written by an army of North American writers.

But a shift is developing that will change the shape of the content industry and increase the value of  talented journalists. Large companies are hiring journalists by the thousands in order to produce content sites that will dwarf the little guys and provide themselves with massive platforms to sell their display ads. In an interview with John Battelle at the Web 2.0 Summit 2009, Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL discusses how he recently hired up to 3,000 journalists and expects that number to grow rapidly as they scale up a content based platform.

2010 will be a year of massive change at maximum velocity.