More media blogger predictions for 2009

Since I came out with my own predictions for 2009, a number of other media blogs have posted lists of media-related prognostications. Here's a roundup:

Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb offers a set of social media predictions that focus on tools "to help us better organize, if not filter, the information we deal with every day."

Dylan Stableford at Folio has no fewer than 117 predictions, rounded up from a slew of experts, mainly about the magazine racket. Some suggest 2009 will see a major contraction in the number of magazine titles published, but there's also Dylan Tweney of Wired, who notes that 335 magazines were launched during 2008, and he expects laid-off journalists and entrepreneurs to start even more of them in 2009, with this proviso: "Most of these magazines will never see print. They'll be online-only publications, aggregators of interesting stories, pictures and miscellany—the original definition of 'magazine'—along the lines of Harper's or its more modern analogue, The Huffington Post."

Diane Mermigas of the Benton Foundation: "Major advertisers such as automotives, financial services, retail and real estate will be diminished and different when they rebound a year from now. Local media could see half of their ad revenue base wiped out in 2009."

Shawn Farner's ("ballsy")social media predictions: "Twitter will be bought. By who? If I had to guess, I’d say Google."

Several commentators at eMarketer weigh in on online ad spending and e-commerce trends.

MarketEvolution has some predictions for the UK newspaper market.

Windchimes has an interesting one worth quoting in its entirety:

Traditional media will rediscover itself: There is a lot of talk on how traditional media will lose its sheen in the coming years. I believe it will continue to do so if it keeps following social media principles without reinventing itself. Take the case of citizen journalism. A couple of TV channels have started running segments where the citizens report in news to the people at large. As a subscriber I am not paying TV channels money to hear news from the common man. I am expecting a thorough analysis done by the reporters and journalists on the events before it being presented to me. I want an unbiased, complete perspective which an untrained citizen cannot provide. For citizen based reports, I always have social media platforms to go to.I predict that in 2009 channels adopting practices like these will die. Traditional media is still very important in our lives and it has to discover and operate from its own strengths rather than borrow principles of social media.

Carnival of Journalism members, hosted this month by DigiDave (that David Cohn of spot.us), were invited to counteract the general gloom with positive predictions. The rest of these are from that group:

Charlie Becket's list at Polis, includes "a consolidation in people’s habits, a gathering around iPhone, Facebook and Google rather than new adventures into virgin territory of the new media jungle."

Jack Lail at Random Mumblings appears to agree, writing that "[e]xcess will get wrung out. Media businesses based on bad ideas and media enterprises that have little viability of profits going forward will morph or fold, or both. Those could include everything from startups to the oldest business in Colorado in the Rocky Mountain News. Yes, some good technologies, good ideas and good news organizations will go down, too. Some good people will lose their jobs. But a business is more than a good idea or good product. That's a positive prediction? For those that remain, yes."

Doug Fisher at Common Sense Journalism looks on the bright side with predictions that include: "Out of all that laid-off brainpower will come some really smart sites/products/stories/multimedia, etc. A lot of smart people have been shown the exit door from newsrooms and media operations. And despite how it sometimes can come across when listening to the echo chamber of the digiterati, not all are luddites or curmudgeons or whiners and piners."

Andy Dickinson expands on two basic predictions: "This will be the year of the journalist" (in the sense that individuals can build their own personal brands, and "Europe will step on Google."

Paul Bradshaw at OJB tells us what 2009 won't be: not the year of the mobile web, not the year of the semantic web. And he agrees with Andy that Google is vulnerable.

Brian Murley at Innovation in College Media is philosophical: "We will be okay. Democracy will survive. Journalism will survive. The news industry will slowly figure out its future - 2009 will be a turning point. I think the next generation of journalists will be among those figuring out the economics of publishing in an era of 'free' on the Internet."

Adrian Monck offers a call to action, rather than conversation.