One problem I’ve had with much discussion about the future of news lately is that it’s too press-centric. It focuses on the press as if it were at the center of the world, as if it owned news, as if news depended on it, as if solving the press’ problems solves news. That’s not the ecosystem of news now. There’s a fundamentally new structure to media and there are many different ways to look at it. And until we realize that, I don’t think we’ll begin to create successful new models for news. So pardon my simplistic drawings, but here’s an attempt to begin to illustrate that new ecosystem of news and media.
We start, of course, with the way things were: news through the filter of the press to us with few other options. We all know this chart:
This is replaced today by a press-sphere in which any of many sources can, thanks to links, add up a story and to fulfilling the need or desire for news and information. The press may be involved and may create a news story. But we might have found that via links from our peers who tell us it’s news (“if the news is important, it will find me”). Either of those might have linked to source material from a company or government site — which now plays a press role in adding to the whole of a story. Witnesses can join in the process directly. Background might come via links to archives. Commentary from observers may add perspective. An accumulation of data may alert us to news or augment it. All of these elements add up to news.
When we put the public at the center of the universe — which is how these charts should be drawn and how the world should be seen, as each of us sees it — we see the choices we all call upon: the press still, yes, but also our peers, media that are not the press (e.g., Jon Stewart), search, links, original sources, companies, the government. It’s all information and we curate it and interact with it with the tools available. And, again, the press stands in a different relationship to the world around it.
So this yields a different view of the news story itself. The notion that news comes in and stories go out — text and photos come in and paper goes out — is an artifact of the means of production and distribution, of course. Now a story never begins and it never ends. But at some point in the life of a story, a journalist (working wherever) may see the idea and then can get all kinds of new input. But the story itself — in whatever medium — is merely a blip on the line, a stage in a process, for that process continues after publication.
When I was talking with the Guardian about their new newsroom, I saw two views of news in 3-D relief: In print, the process leads to a product. Online, the process is the product.
This has an impact on how a newsroom and the journalists in it see themselves and their relationship with the public, over time. It calls into question the organizing principle of newsrooms. It used to be that we were organized around sections — news, sports, business… — and job descriptions — reporter, editor, photographer, designer. Then along came online and we were organized around media — print, online.
But in this new ecology, I think newsrooms will need to be organized around topics or tags or stories because the notion of a section is as out of date as the Dewey Decimal System (hat tip to David Weinberger).
Stories and topics become molecules that attract atoms: reporters, editors, witnesses, archives, commenters, and so on, all adding different elements to a greater understanding. Who brings that together? It’s not always the reporter or editor anymore. It can just as easily be the reader(s) now.
Of course, these aren’t the only architectural changes. Last week, I joined a discussion with the faculty at CUNY about these shifts, which included these ideas:
* The separation of content from presentation on web pages means that design, navigation, brand, and medium can change and are not necessarily controlled by an editor’s design.
* Feeds also have an impact on — and can reduce the value of — packaging and prioritization (also known as editing).
* Live reports from witnesses also reduce the opportunity to package and edit.
* The ecology of links motivates us to do what we do best and link to the rest. It fosters collaboration. It changes the essential structure of a story (background or source material can be a link away).
* Links also turn our readers into our distributors.
* Links turn our readers into editors.
* Aggregation, curation, and peer links become our new newsstand.
* Search and SEO motivate us to create repositories of expertise (topic pages) and make news stories more permanent.
* Search reduces the power of the brand.
* We see ourselves not as owners of content or distribution but as members of networks.
* These networks can be about content, trust, interest, or advertising relationships or all of the above.
I could keep drawing bad charts all day to illustrate the new network, reverse syndication models, the audience as the network, and more. I’ll spare you. (But if you have any charts to show, please do send links.)
These are all fundamental shifts in how news and the world around it is constructed. So to keep talking about newspapers as if they were news is far too limiting in the discussion. It’s bigger now. It’s more complex. It moves over time. It’s more about process than product. It has no limit of sources and handlers and distributors and curators and perspectives. When we rethink this ecology of news, we’ll be in a better position to plan for what’s next.
A couple observations, I don’t agree with the story architecture you are propsing or with the notion of a never ending story. The idea that we can continue to maintain a story alive indefinitely when in fact the story has died or it is no longer relevant is unwarranted. Even if was relevant we would be looking from 20/20 hind sight which by definition it would put the story in historical context and not within the journalistic purview. I can’t imagine taking on every story and making into a wiki, that would make everyone be a historian and not journalist. It is much easier to say who, what where and when as snapshot of time than taking a look at story from distant perspective specially if you are not connected with the events either by time or space. However, the newspaper topic taxonomy proposal is certainly connected with the media changes that we are currently experiencing with alternative media.
Jeff,
This makes a lot of sense…media has indeed become a lot more varied and distributed…Some of the signs are:
– Press releases are losing a lot of their importance (I know some journalists in the tech space who refuse to accept press releases)
– Rise of Microcelebrities (http://www.sezwho.com/blog/2008/01/03/are-you-a-microcelebrity/)
– Online reputations are becoming more important
Indeed this trend toward democratic and distributed conversations is going to very interesting to watch…I am curious about how you see the evolution of fact-gathering function (A lot of news organization) vs opinion-expressing function (typical blogs) playing out.
-Jitendra
Certainly, Jeff, from the perspective of a journo who is IN the media, the process of creating a story might be interesting. You may create the Story but once you post it you lose it: Control, subsequent comments and responses etc, which one would think would belong to your process are in fact, owned by someone else’s process and rapidly become a commodity. See Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWebhttp://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/content_is_becoming_a_commodity.php
Sarah is discussing the commoditization of content from a bloggers perspective.
The internet does not act as a filter to news??? Perhaps a different kind of filter compared to the press, but a filter nonetheless… Stating otherwise seems rather ridiculous.
PS: News as process not product is pretty spot on, but on a fundamental level news is being filtered at some level. Unless you’re the witness to the news event, any account thereof is filtered by definition.
What was it again? The medium is the message? Sounds like the process has adapted, finally…
Interesting article. Shift Communications and the PR Squared blog is fully in line with your statements. (I don’t work for them, but enjoy their work.) They focus on company press releases. They show that what you post above also applies to companies as well.
The press sphere has expanded into Hilbert space, but has content expanded or are we left with wisps of information that fly by at ever increasing speeds, but leave no knowledge in their wake?
In the old days there was a huge lag in getting news. These days we’ve got video phones bringing us news from remote areas, 24 hour TV news, millions of news websites and google news which matches stories.
We’re almost part of the news. We experience tomorrow’s history like people never have before.
Excellent post, Jeff
However, I think you assume one thing which may throw your entire analysis out of kilter.
It appears to me you take for granted that today’s journalists have the same integrity, ethics, and fair minded principles of their predecessors.
From my experience in the technology industry over the past ten years, I think you may want to reconsider the vital role interaction plays, or should play in keeping this new wave of journalists honest and assuring they report the scandals as aggressively as they do the profits and those making all of the money.
For those of your readers who are interested, I have attached an article I wrote recently on a similar subject. It is called Journalism 2009. Beware. It is a bit long.
Thanks for keeping these important issues, and debates, front and center.
George
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Journalism 2009
You know, it occurred to me lately that one of the main victims of a society laden with greed and corruption, such as the one based out of Wall Street and the Silicon Valley today, is the professional journalist. These men and women who were idealist in their youth, and set out on a career path based on sound principles, personal integrity, and honesty … not simply on deceit and the accumulation of cash. From my experience, these folks, in general, believe that telling the world the truth far outweighs any potential financial gain one might achieve by being deceitful or twisting the truth around to suit their sponsors and/or investors.
This appears to be the dying breed, however, and I find it all very sad and depressing. Not so much for me, but for my children and grandchildren.
I actually thought I might want to be a journalist when I ended my first short-lived career as a Navy Officer some time back. But sticking to my roots as a graphic artist and designer won out. Some refer to us as the “starving artists” of our society. I now own several of the leading electronic graphic arts content businesses in the world, however … so, lucky me.
It all started with the “dot com” boom
This notion about the current state of objective journalism first came to me back in the late 90s when the “dot com” industry was just starting to boom. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry was going public. Let alone Jane, Sue, and Abigail.
I started noticing that many of the companies going public were loaded with nothing more than stolen property and hot air. Since several of the major ones (I won’t name names, but some of their initials were Xoom, ZDNet, Lycos, InfoSpace, Jumbo, and ArtToday) had also pirated our proprietary graphic arts software products and were giving them away for “free” as an incentive to sign up “eye-balls”, we stood up and took particular note of what was truly happening in this new Internet world. That, too, was very sad and depressing.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to learn quickly that the likes of Bear Sterns, and other prominent investment banking concerns on Wall Street and elsewhere, were actually encouraging these Internet scams, not trying to report them, or protect their clients or customers, in their IPO circular disclaimers. The term “due diligence” had apparently taken on an entirely different meaning to the investment bankers, lawyers, and auditors in the new “dot com” world.
We were blown away. We weren’t doing things like that in Central Virginia where we were based. In fact, no one I knew was even thinking about building up bogus shell companies based on stolen property, and false promises, and promoting them heavily to unsuspecting little old ladies in Omaha. I guess you could say we were doing things the old fashioned way … with a bit of creativity, integrity, honesty, hard work, and fair play.
Wait a second, since these new Internet IPOs are loaded with stolen property and hot air … what could we do?
Well, we were forced to hire attorneys to protect our property, attorneys who made more in an hour than any of our employees did in a day, or in some cases in an entire week … and things only went from bad to worse after that. The copyright laws in this country were not being enforced by the judiciary at all in the early Internet days. Journalists would not report on the obvious. Journalists did not help us fight this cascading disease. It was as simple as that. Piracy was the new secret weapon in the high tech world. And it was far more profitable than any other weapon in the Internet company arsenals, by a huge margin. Stealing, and promising extraordinary profits from the eyeballs of the future, was accepted as the “new norm”.
So, we came up with a brilliant idea. Let’s provide some incentive to the journalists to tell this story truthfully and see how the little old ladies in Omaha, and elsewhere, react. Journalists love “scoops”, or so we thought. We tracked down the most prominent and active investigative journalists at companies like Marketwatch, TheStreet.com, CNET, Forbes, the New York Times, CNN, NBC, Wired magazine, and elsewhere, and guess what we learned? As soon as a responsible journalist would start reporting the truth about these Internet companies and their IPO scams, the journalist would suddenly clam up completely … be transferred … or disappear off the face of the earth.
What? Why? Well, it seems that almost every company you could imagine was planning their own IPO, acquisition, or merger scam to take advantage of the tech-ignorant public, demonstrate how tech-savvy their aging officers and directors were, and enrich their owners. I won’t name the specific journalists here, or even their companies, but there were quite a few, believe me. I am sure you know many of them. It shocked us all.
So, who did the “dot com” bust really wipe out?
Well, the inevitable “dot com bust” wiped out all of the little old ladies in Omaha. And the little old men, who were counting on their pension, stock portfolio, and mutual finds for survival, as well. The Internet visionaries, venture capitalists, privileged clients, and investment bankers had already taken out all of their millions of dollars quickly, and quietly, and retired, if only temporarily, to their mansions and penthouses overlooking Central Park, San Francisco Bay, and Lake Tahoe.
For a few years after the bust, things started to drift back towards normal, but not for long. You see, a whole new breed of greedy investment bankers, unscrupulous venture capitalists, and unethical business executives had found a brand new prey. A two pronged prey this time. Prong one. Bring in the top software engineers and rocket scientists in the world to bamboozle a still unsuspecting public with blazing Internet speeds, more new technogarble that no one could possibly understand, and new products and services. An even some of the more profitable products and services, like stolen property in digital form, from the past. The Googles of the world set out to make the late 90s and early 2000s look like a pleasant stroll in the park, or a neighborhood tea party, in the annals of history. Their new sights were set in the billions, not the millions.
Where were the objective journalists in all of this?
So where did all of the professional journalists go? Are you kidding? Many of them formed new companies to ride on the Google express train this time around, many settled back into other arenas outside the continuous scams of the technology elite, some formed new media and television shows to capitalize on “the next new wave”, many moved on to other professions, and still others reported the story just as Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft instructed them to do. A few who I admire stood their ground and got pushed aside by their corporate executives.
How many journalists at the Wall Street Journal today do you think are researching unlawful operating procedures, and ongoing copyright infringement activities, at MySpace … with the intent of actually reporting what they find? Who at the New York Times has anything objective to say about some of questionable information being distributed by About.com? Even CNET, perhaps the ultimate hypocrite, is in rumors to be dating Google seriously, while still courting other potential deep pocketed suitors, in the Internet space. Do you think their reporting is objective these days? Okay, who’s job is it to report on digital piracy found throughout the CNET Network, itself. ZDNet and TechRepublic … I don’t think so!
So what is the solution? The vast majority of real people out here want objective journalism in their lives. Not journalism directed only to where the advertising and the money is.
Can bloggers save the day?
Thank God for the bloggers. The little old ladies and men of Omaha are fighting back. They have taught their children to be bloggers (or maybe it was the other way around) … and they have personal stories to tell … and plenty of them. They are not blinded by ambition based on greed, or under the threat of losing their jobs if their public company bosses don’t like what they say. They don’t have to worry about anyone coming down on them for reporting the truth. They are the great equalizers. They may even help to set the woeful politicians and the legal community straight. How great would that be for all of us?
But readers … please beware. It was naivety that got us into this mess in the first place. Many of these new bloggers are lions in sheep’s clothing. They are poisonous snakes in the tall green grass. When I hear that the top blogger reporting about copyright law and protection issues in the country is actually a lawyer on Google’s payroll, it gives me the creeps. It makes me want to hug someone in Omaha. When I watch Yahoo assist China in sending someone (just like your college son or daughter) who has simply reported the truth to jail, it makes me cringe. When I see Google, Microsoft and Yahoo willfully placing advertisements on illegal pornography and gambling web sites, it really makes me wonder. When I realize that the public is actually financing this organized attack on American integrity and honest journalism, it makes me want to scream out even louder.
You would scream out, too, if you really knew all that was happening. The next generations will pay the price for this greed and deception.
Come out bloggers … we are counting on you. And there are now over a billion of us connected to this Internet world who are not out to make our fortune off of stolen property or from greedy business practices and deceit. And billions more to come. Please help us clean up, and wipe out, this greedy and unethical Internet and Wall Street investment banking crowd before it is too late.
For some reason, I have confidence in the people on this one. I am one who is anxious to see the NEW Journalism 2009 come into play.
George P. Riddick, III
Chairman/CEO
Imageline, Inc.
griddick@imageline2.com
Jeff – your observations of the press-sphere should also be a wake-up call to the publishing side of the business who have not yet embraced the vast opportunity associated with “particle theory”. When publishers realize that they are not selling “the page,” “the book,” or “the Web site” but the particles of content themselves, it will become clear that returning to profitability depends on their ability to create systems, processes and selling techniques that match advertiser supported revenue streams to content particles and not necessarily to the curated, branded environment. In this new model that fully embraces massively distributed content everyone wins. Advertisers associate their messages and brands with content that is most relevant; consumers encounter brands in context with content; creators (publishers) monetize not only their own distribution network, but the organic distribution network (long tail) of the content eco-system; and the long tail of distributors (the eco-system) gain some shared financial benefit for propelling the content particles to a broader audience.
Hi Jeff,
We have similar themes.
– The process is the news. I call that Reality Journalism. (http://adecon101.blogspot.com/2008/03/reality-television-comes-to-journalism.html).
– Feeds, weeds, reads is the new circulation model.
– You are brave to end the editor role. There may be no room in real time reporting for the edit role.
– Topics have been replaced by conversations. Conversations have no beginning and no end. They just get hot and cold.
There is a sustainable, new model for online journalism. Individuals get it. But the change is too drastic for entire organizations to agreed and adapt to – particularly those that are driven by bean counters.
Great post, though.
-Dash Chang
The New Economics of Advertising
(http://adecon101.blogspot.com)
would be interested to see a similar analysis on “Learning in 2009”
Jeff, for what its worth: your models (and earlier ones by Paul Bradshaw in the UK) are similar as one I suggested in 2001 in a piece for eJournalist in Australia (and obviously your work and Paul’s is much better informed and sophisticated). There I suggested letting go of the single, press-driven inverted pyramid as the rolemodel for journalistic storytelling, but instead embrace an octagon as a storytelling model:
“an octagon, can be seen as a collection of pyramids (top starting from the
center), each representing a different but interconnected in non-linear style (cf. without
a predetermined point of entry) part of the newsstory. The shared top of these eight
pyramids – each embedded with different kinds of content such as audio, video,
infographics, still images, text, interactive tools, archives and so on – could be seen as
the ‘traditional’ newslead. In a further step towards a multimedia news philosophy one
may consider this shape as an octavo, meaning a folded three-layered (cf. spoken,
written and image language together forming a single text) page which can be unfolded
into the mentioned eight pyramids of content.”
Any of a series of concentric, transparent, revolving globes that together were once thought to contain the moon, sun, planets, and stars. The extent of a person’s knowledge, interests, or social position Yeah!!! send those greed bastards to us and we’ll exploit them!
I am currently a student at the University of Denver and you might be interested to know that our homework assignment was to read this post and respond to it on our class blogs. So I thought I would step out of my comfort zone a bit and send you a link to my blog, written in response to your blog. I’m sure if you poke around my profile a bit you can find my classmates blogs as well if you’re interested in what they have to say.
http://mandashelly.blogspot.com/2012/02/from-my-room-to-driscoll-bridgeand-then.html
Cool!
This topic drives me insane. It is 2012, Newspapers and News Agencies are about as relevant to news as an abacus is to modern math. In the past 6 years the world has undergone a monumental change in communication. All information is now instantly accessible via mobile devices. These mobile devices are available to anyone in the world, and no longer is it a matter of money, because lets be honest, there are bums walking the streets of NY with iPhones. If I want my news I will 100% of the time get it from a source on the internet, and not some dying relic newspaper. If you are one of those people that protests this topic and still tries to convince people that newspapers are important, you are a dinosaur that is so far disconnected from the modern world, that not much will catch you up.
Thanks!