MUMBAI: A majority of Americans (55 per cent ) in an online survey said that bloggers are important to the future of American journalism. 74 per cent said that citizen journalism will play a vital role. The results are contained in a new We Media -- Zogby Interactive poll.

Most respondents (53 per cent) also said that the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76 per cent) said the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

The We Media survey results were released by iFOCOS and pollster John Zogby as part of an iFocos conference on media innovation hosted by the School of Communication at the University of Miami, with major support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In the national survey of adults, 72 per cent said that they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today. A majority of conference-goers who were polled on the subject agreed -- 55 per cent said they were dissatisfied, and 61 per cent said that they believed that traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.

Nearly nine out of 10 media insiders (86 per cent) believe that bloggers will play an important part in journalism's future. The US is now seeing mainstream acceptance of what the survey calls the Power of Us - - the value, credibility, and vital expression of citizen and collaborative media, Until recently, many traditional news enterprises have been skeptical about We Media. They were either fearful or dismissive of our 2003 research forecasting and documenting the change in the media ecosystem. Now the Zogby poll provides additional evidence that "We Media" is an essential component -- perhaps the essential component -- for the agenda for news and information into the future.

iFocos co- founder Andrew Nachison says, "The research documents the widespread recognition that control and influence on how we know what we know is shifting to a vastly more distributed network of empowered individuals and organisations. This obviously will have a big impact on how media organisations evolve and conduct business, but it's really about how we all discover, create, share and apply information, and that's important to all industries, to entrepreneurs, to non-profits, to governments, to individuals and to society as a whole. We are all part of the ecosystem."