With people turning to Web services like Twitter and Flickr, the mainstream media’s dominance is waning.

Lens


Arun Shanbhag, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, said he had not heard the term citizen journalism until he was on his terrace in south Mumbai the day the terrorists struck. He posted short messages about what he saw through a Web service called Twitter.“I felt I had a responsibility to share my view with the outside world,” Mr. Shanbhag wrote in an e-mail to The Times’s Brian Stelter.

The terror attacks in Mumbai underscored a fundamental shift in the way news is reported and consumed worldwide. That day, Twitter postings, cellphone videos and photos on Flickr gave a fuller picture of the carnage in the early stages than was provided by major news outlets.

The Mumbai violence was not the turning point of mainstream media’s dominance. Indeed, that milestone may have already passed. Newspapers around the world are facing declines in both advertising and readers.

The Twitters and Flickrs of the world are only part of the way the void left by shrinking news staffs at newspapers and broadcast stations is being filled.

Another is a new kind of Web-based news operation that has arisen in several American cities, offering serious reporting by professional journalists.

These are unburdened by costly printing presses (and the people to run them), paper, ink and home deliveries.

One, described by The Times’s Richard Perez-Pena last month, is VoiceofSanDiego.org, a nonprofit, which has uncovered several scandals since it was started in 2005. Similar operations have sprouted in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and New Haven, Connecticut.

“Information is now a public service as much as it’s a commodity,” Andrew Donohue, an executive editor of VoiceofSanDiego, said.“It’s one of the things you need to operate a civil society, and the market isn’t doing it very well.”

In another article, Mr. Stetler of The Times told of veteran television news anchors’ being laid off because of their large salaries. In Denver, Los Angeles and Chicago, longtime local news personalities have been told they were out of a job.

An even more drastic money-saving technique is being used by the publisher of Pasadena Now, a Web-only newspaper. The publisher, James Macpherson, fired his staff of seven and outsourced coverage of the Los Angeles suburb to India.“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he told The Times’s columnist Maureen Dowd.“A thousand words pays $7.50.” (This article is about 500 words.) The journalists who were replaced earned $600 to $800 a week.

Mr. Macpherson worked for clothing designers in the ‘90s and had outsourced work to Vietnam. He conceded to Ms. Dowd that with newspaper articles, something is lost in the translation.

But he is not the only one who sees outsourcing as a solution for newspapers.

Dean Singleton, whose MediaNews Group of 54 papers is the second largest in the United States, told a gathering of publishers in October that his company was looking into outsourcing almost every aspect of its business.

“If you need to offshore it, offshore it,” Mr.Singleton said.
“In today’s world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn’t matter.”