He may have a dozen awards tucked under his belt, but that didn't save his job.

David Kaplan, a veteran journalist at top weekly US News & World Report , was laid off early this month. He and the magazine's team of investigative journalists were not the only ones forced to give way to smaller newsrooms.

Across the United States, old media are slashing their staff. First on the chopping block are often investigative journalists the likes of Kaplan.

Content is king, so they say. They're wrong. Content is NOT king. Technology is.

Indeed, content providers - newspapers, television and radio stations - are facing problems everywhere. It's technology and telecommunication companies that are reaping the rewards of the Internet.

Media companies exist to make money and increasingly their profit margins are being squeezed. Advertisers are going online.

For the first time last year, advertisers in the United Kingdom spent more online than on newspapers. In US, online advertising has already outstripped that of radio. Yes, it's a bit slow in this part of the world but that day will come.

The Big Four

Worse still, competitors for the advertising dollar include those which are not strictly content providers - YouTube, MySpace and Flickr to name a few. In another word, advertisers no longer rely on journalism to deliver eyeballs the way they once did with old media.

Indeed, none of the top four online companies - Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL - are media companies. They and 45 others control over 95 percent of the online advertising market. Anyone outside this elite group faces intense competition for a relatively small pot of money.

True, old media has joined the race to claim a piece of the cyberturf, but their online income has so far failed to make up for the sharp decline in their traditional operations.

To add to the crisis, the media industry has, until recently, been enormously profitable. Their profit margins can reach as high as 25 percent a year. Compare this to other Fortune 500 companies where many would kill for a measly seven percent.

Obviously, the party has come to an end for old media. Stocks of these companies are on a free-fall. To satisfy Wall Street, media companies are cutting costs. Journalism suffers as a result.

To survive, some media companies opted to merge. That process has already begun in many countries. In time, we should expect a greater concentration of old media. A few will give up the game altogether and move online.

But competition for online advertising is so acute that digital media economics might not support professionally produced journalism. Thus, expect smaller companies focusing on niche products - political analyses, business news, sports, entertainment - online content which some consumers are willing to pay for.

Ironically, newspapers began with a niche model in their early years. It wasn't until 1835 that modern newspapers emerged lead by the New York Herald - the precursor to the International Herald Tribune - with content catering for all age groups and interests and much more, turning dailies into a supermarket of news.

We have since come a full circle.

What's in store?

Technology has given us more power over how we consume information and media organisations have been trying hard - often unsuccessfully - to understand this new role.

In cyberspace, everyone can have a voice. Power has shifted to the consumers of information who are increasingly content creators as well.

At the same time, however, there's a tendency for news and views to degenerate into noise. The proliferation of new media does not necessarily give us better choices. More choices, yes, but not better choices.

The vast majority of unsolicited opinion on the Web is banal, uninteresting and often offensive. In the end, it's our search for quality that will separate the wheat from the chaff.

Which brings us to another pop-up. Like it or not, media companies no longer have a monopoly on the truth.

Media is anything people want to read, watch or listen to - whatever the source whether amateurs or professionals. And they want it at their fingertips through devices such as mobile phones, PDAs and laptops.

Now that's a pretty scary thought for journalists.

Kaplan recently wrote about female spies in CIA being unceremoniously sacked for having relationships with men while on missions overseas. In contrast, their male colleagues don't get booted out for similar indiscretions.

His story was titled 'Foreign affairs'. It was Kaplan's last investigative piece for US News . But losing his job will not end his love affair with investigative journalism. The same cannot be said about the men and women in suits who own and run media organisations.

It's a brave new world out there. No one has the digital crystal ball to tell us what's in store for the future, not even Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch. One thing is certain though - expect the next 10 years to be rough for the media industry.

And when the dust finally settles, journalism, for better or worse, will never be the same again.

STEVEN GAN was part of an international group which visited five US cities early this month to meet American journalists and editors under the International Visitor Leadership Programme on Investigative Journalism.