ABSTRACT
The traditional news media in pluralistic societies have often made great claims about being at the heart of democracy. As most of the quality news media continue to lose readers and audiences and new forms of communicating news outside of the control of the media companies, such as blogging, gain popularity amongst younger people, one thing is clear. Whatever importance they ascribe to themselves, the traditional news media have no God-given right to retain their position at the communicative core of the democratic process. Indeed, as Barbie Zelizer noted in her excellent 2004 survey of the state of journalism research (Zelizer, 2004: 204), there have been four studies in recent years which have taken ‘the end of journalism’ as their title.
