Here are a couple of articles from Om Malik (i.e. gigaom.com) discussing the fact that the internet has changed the parameters of what and how we consume information. This will be a growing need for curation and validation. Curation is one of the au currant buzz words these days, but with regard to news and information, the sense that someone (or something) can filter what you take in has growing power. The very use of an RSS reader is the start of this ongoing process.
Validation is something else again…It used to be a presumption by us mere readers that newspapers were purveyors of the truth (capital T), and that the TV news anchor men would never manipulate us. Things change. The fact is that there is a growing need for validated news, to get us out of the trough of sensationalism (consider any recent criminal trials to get what I am talking about…). The fact is, that we, as end users and consumers of information, need something equivalent to the UL sticker on electrical appliances (i.e. it is what it says it is…).
There are some obvious business perspectives upon the news and information industry which are problematic. There is what could be called a ‘race to the bottom’ where anyone can provide similar content for less (and as such would win…to gain more readership). As a consequence, paywalls (like the New York Times, Washington Post, and many news magazines) don’t have much of a defense against the future.
The idea of what Twitter is may gain more currency. To have a news article rendered as a collection of particles (i.e. various tweets, and other transitory sources) changes the notion of what we consider news.
It is starting to look as if we may be changing as much as the journalism profession before this settles out.
Future of Media: Curation, Verification, and News as a Process
http://gigaom.com/2011/05/20/future-of-media-curation-verification-and-news-as-a-process
As part of a “social media summit” this week, the BBC posted an overview of how its user-generated content desk handles reports from the field — verifying and curating them in much the same way that Andy Carvin of NPR has been doing for the past few months during the upheaval in the Middle East. As I’ve written before, there is a growing need for this kind of curation, but there is also the need to start looking at news as a process and not as a pristine, finished product.
While many media outlets have web editors who track reports on Twitter and other social media, the BBC is unique (as far as I know) in having a special desk that sits in the middle of the newsroom and pulls in reports from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and anywhere else it can find information. The desk staffers then try to verify these reports, and some of the ways they do that are fascinating. In a sense, they are trying to do CSI-style forensic analysis in real time, by checking things such as:
- Looking at weather and shadows to confirm that the conditions shown fit with the reported date and time of a photo or video.
- Checking the accents and language in a video or other report to make sure that they are consistent with the location, using BBC staff who speak those languages.
- Verifying locations against maps of a region, and cross-checking images against known images from that location.
Andy Carvin has also talked about how he sees verification as being a big part of his job in curating Twitter feeds from people in the trouble spots he is reporting on — feeds that are made up of people he has hand-picked because they are reliable in some way. Whenever a video is posted that purports to be of an attack, or reports of government leaders or high-profile individuals killed, Carvin spends a lot of time trying to get confirmation from others in the region or other reliable sources.
Future of media: This is no time for incrementalism
http://gigaom.com/2011/06/12/future-of-media-this-is-no-time-for-incrementalism
In a recent piece for Forbes magazine, Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti looks at the challenges that mainstream media of all kinds are facing — falling circulation, the gap between traditional print advertising and the smaller revenues from online advertising, and the difficulties of trying to be digital while still running a legacy business. So what are his solutions for what he calls the “broken business model of quality journalism?” Narisetti doesn’t really have any, which isn’t surprising: as the recent report from the FCC on the future of media showed, it’s a lot easier to describe the problems facing the media industry than it is to come up with answers. But one thing is becoming clear: incremental changes are not enough.
Narisetti says in his piece that while many media companies such as the Washington Post are growing their online audiences, that doesn’t even come close to making up for the loss of print subscribers, because one generates revenue and the other doesn’t:
The print subscribers we lose are typically loyal readers who spent 40-plus minutes with The Post each day and have done so for years. The majority of online readers — both new and old — are promiscuous, read tiny morsels in under five minutes per visit and think the same Post content that others pay for in print is not worth paying for online.
Paywalls and apps aren’t the answer
The WaPo editor also notes that while many mainstream media companies have gotten good at cutting costs, they have “consistently failed to imagine and then incubate a Craigslist, a Groupon [or] a Monster.com… nor are they any closer today than they were last year in fixing the broken business model of quality journalism.” And while charging readers may seem like the right solution, whether via paywalls or iPad apps, Narisetti argues (correctly, I think) that there are some serious issues with those answers as well, including:
A metered model makes your business susceptible to the will of a few readers — those who consume the most articles/pages. Often, less than 5% of these kinds of visitors account for nearly 50% of your page views. And they have very little barriers to exit.
Aggregators like Huffington Post will still find ways to deliver your content for free and often with more engaging technologies since they don’t have to invest much in content creation.
Narisetti also makes a point that I think many newspaper and magazine publishers miss, which is that media companies are trying to charge readers for what amounts to a traditional website-reading experience (or an even more crippled one, given the “walled garden” nature of many iPad apps) at the same time that new display and distribution models such as Flipboard and Zite and TweetMag are offering something much more appealing, and free.
Scrolling on Web sites has always been a poor experience for consuming news. Now, just as new devices and digital experiences — none invented by major news brands — create richer engagement outside our sites, we are talking about charging readers for sub-optimal Web site consumption.
When it comes to solutions, Narisetti suggests a couple of potential answers, including some kind of licensing scheme that would take advantage of the aggregation of mainstream media content by outlets such as The Huffington Post. But he admits that there’s no guarantee any of these will work — which is good, because trying to license content to web aggregators seems like a losing proposition to me, or at least not the kind of business that is going to produce a huge amount of income for traditional publishers.
An imagination deficit
In terms of what media companies can do, I think the Washington Post editor is right when he says that the biggest challenge facing the industry is what he calls “an imagination deficit.” Instead of just trying to charge for existing content, he says more organizations need to take risks with their business model.
The problem is that most mainstream media entities are not designed for experimentation, and in many cases the way they function hasn’t changed noticeably in decades. Few have taken as dramatic a step as the Journal-Register Co., where CEO John Paton has reversed the traditional structure of a paper and put digital staff in charge of the entire operation. And only a few have set up the kind of “skunk works” labs or spinoff units that can experiment freely or come up with things like News.me, as Anil Dash of Activate Media recommends in a presentation I wrote about recently.
It’s true that some media companies are making small efforts to change the way they do things, or trying new tools or ways of reaching users — the way that Brian Stelter is with Tumblr at the New York Times, or the way that his colleague Nick Kristof does with his use of Facebook (ironically, Narisetti himself caused a minor firestorm on Twitter in 2009 when he made some critical comments about the Washington Post‘s new social-media policy, and later briefly cancelled his account).
What does the journalism of the future look like?
http://gigaom.com/2011/06/13/what-does-the-journalism-of-the-future-look-like
We’ve spent so long consuming the news in fairly predictable formats — the short story, the long feature, the four-part series designed to win awards, the TV documentary, and so on — that the new forms of journalism we’re seeing can be confusing. Perhaps not surprisingly, there is also some controversy over whether one form is replacing or usurping another form. Frederic Filloux revisits this debate in a Monday Note post, in which he takes issue with Jeff Jarvis’s stance on real-time journalism. But all of these new forms have the potential to broaden the field of journalism and media immensely, and that’s a good thing.
Filloux’s blog post, entitled “Jazz Is Not a Byproduct of Rap Music,” is a response to something Jarvis wrote several weeks ago, in which the author and New York University City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism professor argued that the news article — the central unit of storytelling that we have become familiar with in newspapers and other forms of media — should no longer be the default for every news event. In many cases, Jarvis said, the article or story should be seen as a “value-added luxury or byproduct” of the process of news-gathering, rather than the central goal in every situation.
In place of the traditional story, Jarvis said we should be looking to the kind of real-time reporting and curating that some journalists have been doing with Twitter and other forms of social media including Tumblr — as New York Times reporter Brian Stelter did during the aftermath of a tornado in Joplin, Mo. recently, and as Andy Carvin of NPR has been doing during the Arab Spring. Said Jarvis:
Articles are wonderful. But they are no longer necessary for every event. They were a necessary form for newspapers and news shows but not the free flow, the never-starting, never-ending stream of digital. Sometimes, a quick update is sufficient; other times a collection of videos can do the trick.
In his post, Filloux takes issue with Jarvis’s view and argues that the story format is still necessary — in fact, he says that a comprehensive article following a news event like the uprisings in Egypt is even more necessary than it used to be, because someone needs to “understand and to correct excesses and mistakes resulting from an ever expanding flurry of instant coverage” via Twitter and other social media.
I made a similar argument in my response to Jarvis’s original thesis — my point being that we need more curation and context and analysis, not less, because of the ever-increasing tide of information we are being subjected to from all sides (not to mention the difficulty of verifying sources like the recent gay blogger in Damascus, which turned out to be a fiction). In a response, Jarvis said I misrepresented his views, something he also accuses Filloux of doing in a blog post responding to the Monday Note.
I think Jarvis and Filloux and I are all saying the same thing, although it might not look that way at first. Jarvis’s point, as I take it, is that there are too many stories written that add very little value — long chunks of background just to fill out the length of a piece, contributing nothing in the way of analysis, and so on. Stories are also written that duplicate, in some cases dozens or hundreds of times, the exact same information that is available elsewhere. This is undoubtedly true.
