The Future of News and the Future of the Internet
December 8th, 2008 | by dkimerling | Published in Future of the Internet | 10 Comments
By Daniel Kimerling
There has been an odd confluence of events over the past several weeks. The first is the realization that one of the most storied industries in the United States, the newspaper business, is on the verge of financial ruin. There has been writing on the wall for several years, especially with the acquisition of the storied Tribune Company by a consortium of investors led by Sam Zell only to have it file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection only about a year after its acquisition, and sale of The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and the one-by-one shuttering of great regional papers throughout the country. But in the past month, three events have shown that this business cannot survive in its current form. First is the Christian Science Monitor’s decision to stop having a print edition because of a decline in the number of subscribers and increased production costs. The second is the disclosure that for the first time the majority of revenue for the Washington Post Company is coming from a non-newspaper business, Kaplan. Third and most surprising is that the most important journalistic resource in the country, the New York Times has a over a billion dollars in debt and only less than 100 Million dollars in cash on hand (more like 50 Million Dollars). In other words, the Old Gray lady is in a lot of trouble and might not survive in its current form it for another year.
Yet, for all the doom and gloom which one cannot help but feeling when looking at the current state of the newspaper business in the United States, I may have seen the future of News. Not surprisingly that future intersects with that of the Internet in many significant ways. And surprisingly, I saw it for the first time during the horrific events of last week’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai. For those of us who need up to date information on global events, normal sources for such news are CNN, the BBC, or other similar organizations. However, these traditional media organizations were terribly slow in providing news coverage of the tragedy. How was information spread? Surprisingly it was through Twitter, the oft-mentioned microblogging platform. Because Twitter offers short, near real time communications, it allowed people under attack to transmit information, allowed media events to aggregate information, and allowed consumers to receive information. It has turned into what one might call, for lack of a better term, a crowd-sourced information dissemination system. The power of distributed nodes, a hall mark of the Twitter model, is especially powerful in this and other emergent situations as it offers speed and agility, in stark contrast to the adjectives associated with a television journalist’s satellite truck or a print journalist’s laptop. A second exciting technology that demonstrated its value during the Mumbai attacks was that of people powered search, most commonly associated with the search start-up Mahalo. Mahalo works by having writers curate search pages, combining aspects of Wikipedia, About.com, and Google. In the case of breaking news they have a team that can build pages dynamically, and aggregate content from across the web, whether social media or standard content. In doing so, they can adapt nearly as quickly as real world events can occur. Breaking news might have actually proven to be the best use case for people-powered search.
As old businesses dies, new ones spring forth to offer interesting ways to solve consumers’ problems. People desire to receive information and that desire is not subsiding. In fact in the complex world that we live in, people need more information, not less. The power of the Internet is that it gives platforms for information to be shared. Twitter and Mahalo show the disruptive the power of taking that information and giving it structure. In that regard, they show that the future of the news business lies in the future of the Internet.
December 8th, 2008 at 5:36 pm (#)
[...] was just described as “a crowd sourced information dissemination system.” Could this be the future of news? Worth the read. Rate this: [...]
December 8th, 2008 at 5:55 pm (#)
Please don’t suggest that Mahalo is the future of news. The vast majority of the content on Mahalo is simply copied / pasted from other, legitimate, news sources and resources. You can call it “aggregating” or “building pages dynamically” all you like, but the truth is it’s information, that is more accurately and elegantly presented in thousands of other places.
And how exactly is Mahalo better than the New York Times? The financial woes of the Times don’t detract from its value as a source of some of the best writing and reporting around. As it stands, Mahalo is simply repurposing content with just enough rejigging / reordering to sneak through the plagiarism turnstile. I’m rarely this blunt, but if anyone is going to Mahalo.com for news instead of reading the NY Times or even CNN, then that’s truly tragic for them and their knowledge of the world.
Furthermore, the “breaking news” approach goes completely against the only really viable business model for Mahalo. They’ll only succeed if they’re a pure SEO play, showing up well in organic search for millions of search terms and generating enough cheap content to drive many millions of page views. If their pages are primarily news aggregation, then they’ll quickly become stale and irrelevant and won’t generate enough visits on an ongoing basis to pay their freight, so to speak.
Sorry for the rant; there’s something about the totally lame sham that is Mahalo that really gets me going.
December 8th, 2008 at 7:25 pm (#)
I think you missed video and on-site reporting… I don’t think the majority of people in the world sat by their computer and waited for someone they followed on Twitter to start banging out updates on Mumbai. We watched Fox News.
Video shot by people that can connect instantly online and share it in a video-based Twitter is where news can originate from, not just be commented on like at Twitter. Twitters few characters per message limit is severely limited – and people that have a message to get across will write 16 twitters in a row to get one long message out – how frustrating is that to read? What if 2700 people are doing that same thing about an event like Mumbai? Let’s skip Twitter – it’s nothing but a bunch of people telling others what they find interesting. Plus, it’s annoying as heck for those of us with ADD/ADHD. Plus Twitter only works if you happen to follow someone living where the event is happening if you want news from an original source.
Yes, print newspapers are dead – and rightly so. You can’t update a newspaper more than once every 24 hours. That’s worthless. How about a newspaper that twits… they write the original article as fast as they can, publish it online. They update it with blue text that they add – varying shades of blue with bright being the latest news… the darker shades of blue, turning toward navy and then eventually black as it too becomes old news?
What about a site that is a map. One clicks on the map to see where are ‘nodes’ that are broadcasting news about anything. In the Mumbai case – we could have picked phones that were broadcasting videos about what was going on. The nodes we see on the map, when blown up in size show us – audio, video, text – and we can choose. Why isn’t Twitter dynamic and nodes geotagged at least? We can choose who to follow for the next 10 minutes, and then once we’re done – move on…? IS Twitter geo-tagged and I”m missing something?
Are there groups put together of twitterers that are by category and I can follow who twits about the latest HP computer news, European football news, etc?
We really need better video and even audio from all over the world available instantly – forget about text – it’s so limited. We’ll take it while we can get it – but I hope it’s not for too long.
December 8th, 2008 at 8:34 pm (#)
Actually, I lay out here why I think Twitter is not only the future of news, but it is a new medium to itself…
http://luckyrobot.com/2008/12/03/twitter-is-a-new-medium/
Gerry
December 8th, 2008 at 10:28 pm (#)
I don’t think that Twitter is the future of news because it clearly cannot stand on its own, but it is certainly one of many elements (and many will come) that make digital news a more engaging experience. -yvette
http://arcticpenguin.wordpress.com/2008/12/04/news-in-the-age-of-web-20/
December 9th, 2008 at 10:35 am (#)
[...] the same time, if this is happening to the Tribune, who isn’t it happening to? Here’s a great post on the Future of the News, in a similar vein, with more emphasis on Twitter and Mahalo for the delivery of news. Be sure to [...]
December 10th, 2008 at 7:18 am (#)
Yes, Mahalo would be the future of Internet news if its head didn’t alienate all the intelligent, committed folk who work there.
December 10th, 2008 at 12:15 pm (#)
Two quick points on this interesting post:
- While it is true that The Christian Science Monitor is moving in a dramatic new direction with its Web-first format, it will not be Web-only. As the article you link to notes, we’ve developed a weekly print publication that we will begin publishing when we end our print daily in the spring. We also will provide a daily Monitor briefing via email — a PDF of the big stories of the day that we’ve published on our site, CSMonitor.com, and that are ranked in importance by the editors.
- I, too, was impressed by the use of Twitter in the Mumbai attacks. But I submit that only organizations devoted to the news tell the story before and after an acute event like Mumbai. It takes source development, travel, and the backing of a company to ensure that professional journalists can get at the “why” of a story. I think a more realistic view of journalism’s future is one that is pro-am, that taps users, crowd-sources, and bloggers but that still pursues journalism in a professional way with professional standards.
John Yemma
Editor,
The Christian Science Monitor (CSMonitor.com)
June 18th, 2009 at 2:27 pm (#)
[...] was just described as “a crowd sourced information dissemination system.” Could this be the future of news? Worth the [...]
August 29th, 2009 at 1:51 pm (#)
[...] was just described as “a crowd sourced information dissemination system.” Could this be the future of news? Worth the [...]