The television, internet and blogging has changed the very way that people communicate, changed how people evaluate and relate information. Readers don’t know who to trust anymore and they don’t know how to find out. We used to rely on the corporate owners to guarantee trust and trustworthiness and to give support to journalists doing the hard work, but no longer!

Finally, specializations in virtually every field have distanced the flow of developments, news, events and important people from individual audience members. The information is either so disconnected that we can’t grasp it cohesively to make sense of it, or it is all fed to us like pablum- no one thing more significant than any other thing.

We are so overloaded that we must pick and choose- we can’t even afford the time to be open to new things, let alone to be educated on important matters and developments that we really do need to know. People cannot analyze relevancy anymore.

We forget that before the printing press, nearly every soul on the planet was illiterate. Even today’s most backwoods, possum-eating hillbilly, who reads one Sunday newspaper, gets more information in that one sitting than almost anyone did in their entire lifetime before that great invention.

There was a native, (if I remember correctly) Red Jacket, who noticed that the white man was very much into words. He commented that the white man would drown himself and the world in words at some point in time, a point I think we’ve reached.

Information is now a pure commodity, except for the few hangers-on to principle; therefore even specialized information like the conferences you mention are being marketed to the masses, whether they need it or not, in order to increase income. The masses cannot tell if they need it or not either. Other considerations are set aside in order to sell ‘content.’

Blogging is still one great experiment, one that I doubt we’ve seen the best days of yet. But it faces incredible challenges. For example, there isn’t investment in journalist’s ability to get great content, as it used to be in different and competing media companies. That competition meant working to hire the best journalists, like a great team and send them out to get the greatest ’scoops.’ No longer! There is no thrill, or benefit, for big media in holding the powers-that-be accountable to the people.

Big media companies now simply feed off of one another’s content in order to reduce costs and keep profits high. They no longer go get their own content, no longer send particularly talented journalists or investigative reporters anywhere. They’ve all ‘oursourced’ the sourcing and settle for rehashing the same stuff, perhaps on different ’sides’ and now almost all media sounds the same.

In my estimation, blogging could be the next big place for true journalism, investigative reporting, and competent commentary to show up, but until it is able to finance the great investigations, the great stories, the great scoops; until it gets support for publishing the hard stories and holding people accountable; it will struggle as you have laid out so well. It will disappoint audience. It needs to learn how to relay relevant content to the new mindset effectively. It is an awesome tool that risks dying on the vine for lack of nutrition, support and care.

Too bad, too, since out of all the times of humanity’s history, we need accurate information now more than ever.