Boston Globe staffer Susan Milligan reported in her story Newspaper Champions vs New Media about a senate committee hearing called to discuss the demise of traditional news media that Senator John F. Kerry pointed out some startling facts:

- Google topped $21.7 billion in advertising revenue in 2008, while the news it provides is an aggregate from free news sources.
- Craigslist, which provides free classified ads on-line, gets about one billion visits a month, costing newspapers billions of dollars a year.
- YouTube has more than 100 million viewers each day and about 65,000 new videos uploaded daily. Its ad revenue reportedly totals somewhere between $120 million and $500 million a year.
- Facebook, the free-access social networking website, now has 200 million users and is adding 700,000 new users each day. It reportedly had $300 million in ad revenue last year. Ironically, the New York Times has a paid circulation of 1.45 million, but on Facebook the newspaper has 447,926 “friends.”
- Mobile subscribers total some 250 million in the United States and send more than a billion text messages each day. This two-way interactive media is getting more and more attention from advertisers. It’s estimated that the mobile advertising industry already exceeds $2 billion annually.

As the economic model continues to shift, one may wonder….. as advertising revenues continue to vanish, what will happen to the great investigative journalism that marked the last half of the 20th Century? Will the emerging news media be more fragmented by interests and political partisanship?

What do you think?