Traditional News Outlets — Living Among the Guerrillas - Bill Keller

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/magazine/mag-27lede-t.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

I personally don't think that newspapers or what is termed derisively "traditional media" is going to go extinct. The paradigm will change, the way we interact with our media will continue to evolve, but there is always going to be a demand for actual news, not just opinion. Much of the letdown with conservative media is that it is simply a passing of opinion on news reported by others. Fox news has made piles of millions based on this, as have their imitators. To further this, consumers have begun to view news as they do other products - they want the news, the reporting of actual events, to conform to what they "ordered". They don't want information that conflicts with their worldview, with their deeply held beliefs. They want it to confirm what they already believed.
This is what O'Keefe seeks to deliver: actual news in the form of what you already believed. The problem is that it is only useful in "cultural" narrative. What would O'Keefe do in Libya? How would his type of guerrilla  reporting help you learn anything about Japan or how the earthquake victims are enduring? Julian Assange can belatedly distribute what officials thought, but only months later. This is where the traditional media will survive. Sure a blogger in Benghazi might be able to tell a story no reporter could get. A video posted from a cell phone can augment the story about the earthquake, but it can't tell us what we want or need to know.
The model we have right now is going to change, that is for sure. The Times and institutions like it had better change with the preferences of consumers if they want to survive, or at least attract consumers with superior product. I only hope, for all of our sakes, that the hunger for actual news, for the first hand description of world shaking events, never leaves us. Otherwise those that O'Keefe purports to despise and Assange fear will find it easier and easier to hide in plain sight.