Thanks to my “European family” every year at Christmas I spend most of my time in the lounge areas of the airports. This is the occasion to take a look to all magazines and newspapers that usually I don’t succeed to read, moreover in this period you can find out a lot of forecasts for the coming year and also some scoops. This year on USA Today and Financial Times find out some interesting but also worrying ideas. According to Marshal Cohen of NPD Group, on USA Today (full article here), the consumers would rather to read professional articles made up by experts and not by simple passionate bloggers, Cohen declares that the “blog category” is out and that it will survive only just like a “private spaces” to express personal opinions. He explains that “The average person may well be shouting ‘I want a say,’ but that’s created an absence of legitimacy on the Web”. It should bean interesting issue but then he suggests that the legitimacy on web “maybe it’ll be Oprah, or maybe it’s Consumer Reports” . On the Italian scenery, for instance it could be the same among Tombolini and BlogFood spaces. It seems that the legitimacy and the authority to take part of the “blogosphere” will be one of the most important issue in the next future. The same article, focused on “Getting real” , debases blogs while praising and amplifying social networks such as Myspace and Facebook (well, this is clearly the American prospective, in fact it seems that in US everyone got a Facebook account)…well, what about chatting with granny on MySpace or Facebook about dinner plans? Interesting but unreal (at least for the next 10 years). Fortunately the article ends with a positive estimates for food, beverage and leisure sector, indeed according to Usa Today the consumers, in spite of terrorism and social matters, will spend 2008 in “eating more red meat, drinking, smoking” , deferring their repentance until 2009. What’s important (and really negative) in my opinion is that in the USA the official press considers “blogs phenomenon” with suspect. However two different policies are adopted, in fact, while some press offers to users an online space to blog, others are intended to run down the blog role, ridiculing their function and contents. In this case I totally agree with Luca Conti of Pandemia and it’s smart post about blogosphere and American online press. Well I don’t mean that blogs will change the world, but they’re part of an important process for information fruition, that will be run by giants such as Google, Yahoo and others, leaving behind the current information providers. In the future the reading of traditional press will certainly inspire interesting conversations but to get exact information and advices we will search somewhere else. As the digital music is slowly tearing down the traditional music industry, it will be the same for the information system, if it won’t adequate. Just to be clear I don’t have any idea or proposal about the news presentation in the immediate future but in my opinion more like this

Than like this…

(I choose “Repubblica” because – according to me – it’s the best among online newspapers).