What’s Happening to News?
Posted on August 10, 2006
Filed Under Channels and Content, Content Co-Creation, New Tools, European Web 2.0 |
I got talking with Laurence Timms this morning, author of blog aggregator Chuquet, a UK product that nonetheless finds itself focusing on American high tech debates. Chuquet works by aggregating blogs based on their common links.
The subject of our discussion: What is happening with news information? Is aggregation providing a better or more satisfying set of insights than reportage did?
I was interested to talk with Laurence because I’d also been in touch with personalbee, and a couple of months back I’d been looking at Squidoo and I’ve been trying to get this blog into different profiling services - most recently blogburst.
These are all ways of prioritising information or of making information visible. While the people behind them are busy developing the concepts and user interfaces, the new requirement is of course to find a way to adapt them to a MySpace dominated world. If you are Google you just pay Newscorp $ 900 million, the rest of us have to go figure.
I’ve argued with Laurence that too many of the aggregator technologies appeal to technically informed people and those for whom a narrow array of information is vital and fun. What do I want from information services?
First, the old push info services used to get my back up. They assumed, even when I did some personalisation, that my interests were largely similar to other people’s. This is the default position of every aggregator.
In reality my interests lie in being first, being different, being ahead of the curve. I’d suggest every person with a news obsession, or even interest, is exactly the same. What a group of Web 2.0 analysts in Silicon Vallye are discussing, for example, has passing value. You want to check it and make sure you’re missing nothing, and then move on.
I suggested that the value system that newspapers brought to information was a welter of novelty coupled to insight. They may not be as good at is as they used to be at it - a problem of confidence and an unwillingness to back product with cash - but that used to be an essential component of being a news person. And it’s what made specialist mags like WIRED unmissable, for a few years. You focused on life reforming itself.
Laurence’s take on this is that tools like Chuquet, in the end, provide raw material that can act a bit like newspapers did. At one level they can be seen as the headline writer’s friend or a parallel to the ethos of a paper. They are giving an overview.
That overview can be used as the jump point for drilling into information or it’s the place where you start analysing what people are up to. Treated the latter way they bring the novelty that the web and newspapers excel at - the deeply satisfying though temporary buzz of being in the know. They’re a place to get you thinking.
Chuquet is currently undergoing a big redesign to prioritise this thought process over simple aggregation. I think that’s got to be a right decision.
The other side of the coin is that news organisations are now on the look out for cheap and free content. This is a very difficult subject to approach in an unbiased way. In the UK senior figures in journalism like John Lloyd, an FT magazine editor, have argued that there is enough inherent superiority in a journalistic approach to information that it must be preserved. A chunk of that debate can be found here.
As a journalist I came to the view a long time ago that journalists had lost the ability to separate their own worlds (the press pass, the newsroom, the expense account, the sheer power of forming opinion) from the worlds of people they had to deal with. That’s not to say they are shallow or craven but that even a journalist of Lloyd’s standing cannot know his own bias.
As an example journalism in general has lost sight of social equality as a political objective and has bought into the idea that western democracies are, generally speaking, as fair as can be expected, in part because journalism at the level of influence that these debates take place, is as fair and well rewarded as can be expected.
Meanwhile the changes we’ve seen in media industry structures mean many journalists now labour at unliveable wages and fees, as do many people at the lower end of the social scale. You can say that doesn’t really matter or that’s just life, but its impact in journalism is this:
While news organisation seek out free content they’ve already reduced the cost of much content to levels where stories are not properly researched. Lloyd’s own newspaper is as guilty as any of making journalism a sweat shop industry. The compromises journalists make have become of the bread and butter variety.
The introduction of free content or citizen content is the natural outcome of newspapers and television developing this merciless economy and the debate now about old fashioned new values does nothing to mitigate the damage done (that debate by the way tends to involve senior editors who had the power to make journalism a more liveable economic system, by paying a living wage/fee structure).
Into this world the upsurge of citizen journalism initiatives has been a breath of fresh air and the disruptive impact it is having on major news organisations is valuable.
What I’m looking for from the blog aggregators and content visibility services though is a set of values that in turn a reader might attach a monetary value to and that will reward my skills and those of oteh rpeople who commit to information as a way of life.
I doubt those services are going to go out on a sizeable monthly susbcription and the temptation is going to be to stress, continually, the equality of all participants.
It seems to me though that if the tools are put in the hands of people who aspire to creating information that is as accurate as possible, has a high novelty value, is framed in ways that its social and political and economic implications are clear, is timely…. you quickly sense that the machine is not going to do this and that what we really need are new newspapers and new magazines that are fertile in cyberspace and on paper.
That after all is what the 19th century gave us. New aggregations of people with an ambition to reflect the world with the highest level of capability.
So what’s happening to news? The venture capital and investment world is waiting on applications that supercede old media when in reality what needs to happen is that new groups of people are brought together to createa new class of product based on technology and human interest.
The personalbee, squidoo type service looks to be part of that movement, though my complaint would only be that the aspiration level is historically quite low.
Comments
One Response to “What’s Happening to News?”
Leave a Reply
[…] I posted yesterday on how news organisations have undermined journalistic quality by reducing fees to the point where being a freelance journalist is hardly a viable living any longer. […]