So Tom, Is The Internet Losing?

So Tom Kyte came and talked to our class about his experience with blogging and sharing his vast knowledge through the Internet. One thing he mentioned stuck out with me and then was reinforced in another class I'm taking. Tom's monthly readership is approximately 10,000 unique visitors to his personal blog; 100,000 to his Ask Tom blog at Oracle; and 500,000 through a column in a print magazine. I'm taking a weekend class on Domestic Violence that met this past weekend. One of our speakers was Peter Banks, the Director of the Law Enforcement Training Center for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. He explained how the "Internet Age" increased their monthly calls for information or help from 12 per month to 2,500 per month. However, in one case he mentioned (that was offered as typical), forensic sketches of a murdered child's reconstructed face didn't yield any information after several months in circulation, but once the child's face was shown on nationwide nightly news programs, it took literally 2 minutes for 4 calls to come in identifying the deceased child. Peter also said that the best "marketing" material they have is the "Have you seen this child" mailings that go to millions of households with other advertising via the US Postal Service.

My point in all of that is that the Internet, for all its power and ability to bring together "the masses", still doesn't reach the numbers of people that traditional media reaches. While it can be easily argued (and I'm sure someone will argue with me) that Tom delivers more developed and detailed information via Ask Tom than the print magazine, his website still misses 80% of the magazine subscribers. Similarly, although the Internet has increased the visibility and accessibility of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, it is still the traditional media that reaches people and gets the results.