TEDChris: The untweetable

"It'll be publicly funded and/or subsidized by visionary non-profit foundations. The dear old BBC is not a bad model." Agreed wholeheartedly, although most Americans would never confess to this.

Insightful response Chris - thanks! Alongside the big stuff - the paradigm shifts forced on news services by the web/rapidly evolving comms networks, and the desperate need for new business models - is the issue of the technology base.

Ink on paper is an incredibly versatile technology - it enables information to be browsed and assimilated far faster than information presented on a screen. But it lacks 99.9% of the functionality of digital media. With it's demise it seems we are faced with two futures:

1. Forsaking the advantages of print for the convenience of digital data display on (and I'm showing my biases here) nasty little low-res displays that make your eyes/head/fingers ache, or...

2. Creating hybrids that offer the best of the print and digital worlds.

My hope is that #2 is the direction things end up going in. The Kindle on steroids is a half-hearted attempt to head in this direction, but it has a long way to go, and I think it still misses the point of what makes the paper/ink medium such a good one.

And as you point out, developing the technology base without recognizing the bigger issues is a myopic non-starter!

anyway the news is just a cry for help .... it all started with runners ...

won't miss it

Thanks for this Chris. Was in a discussion yesterday with someone who's position was that the abundance of publishing technology has reduce the quality of journalism.. I like the vision of the below as a counter worldview...

"So instead of, a national newspaper with, say, 600 journalists + 3m readers, you may end up with maybe 100 super-insightful news curators, columnists and analysts, aided by 10,000 citizen journalists/contributors/posters/commenters (and the new package will quite possibly reach 50m+ readers). It's a painful prospect for many... but I suspect the only hope for survival. (And the resultant editorial package might just end up being richer, more detailed, more varied, more inclusive, and... dare one say it? ...better!)"

...Why everybody focused on the medium for news delivery? If I were a news exec, I would focus on the customer to create a "news environment" that catered to their individual preferences... both in media and in content. It might include some print, some digital, and some reference. I notice that TimeMag is beginning to launch their "environment"... http://bit.ly/kjcES

In the age of RSS, the Kindle and GoogleNews, we readers have lots of distribution alternatives. Why don't the print media work on expanding the environment to one that matches the individual demand, not the medium's supply?

A couple of thoughts along these lines:
--Says' Law: Supply creates its own Demand... I think not any more in this digital world on the micro-economic level
--N. Venkatraman's 5th Level of IT-enabled Business Transformation: Business Scope Redefinition... How are the print media redefining their business?
--Michael Dell: "I want to own the customer": something the print media should learn... Micheal is rumbling about making PDA cellphones... not his core business, but it is where his customers are...

I have a long and deep love of newspapers, but what exactly is being mourned? Media existed before newspapers and will, I predict, thrive even as the institution of the daily print paper declines.

One of the most important stories on the swine flu outbreak (factory farms, aka CAFOs, as a global public health threat) was first reported online by Huffington Post and Grist. Both were widely linked on Twitter, which led to more blog posts (including a couple I wrote for http://trackerblog.instedd.org). By the end of the week, MSM news crews were tripping over each other racing down bumpy roads to a tiny town in southeast Mexico to take a look a giant pig farm.

Over the last 20 years, there has been no shortage of articles, books, television news exposes, radio segments and documentaries on CAFOs. But it has taken the web to unleash the power of the aggregate. Seen individually, these stories alarm. Seen together, their collective roar may finally manage to turn outrage into action.

These are very exciting times for media.

Full disclosure: I edit a niche news aggregator that focuses on health issues, humanitarian work and technology that supports both (http://www.trackernews.net). It is a little unusual in that stories (breaking news, research papers, blog posts, websites, book reviews, e-books — print, audio, video) are grouped for contextual relevance, rather than organized by category - which makes for a rather eclectic page. Usually. This past week it's been all swine flu...

In a sense, though, TrackerNews is an elaborate demo. The real flower of the experiment is a custom tool currently in development that would make it easy for anyone to aggregate, curate, organize and share information.

- J.A. Ginsburg

p.s. Several years ago, I curated an exhibit on the evolution of the modern newspaper as a graphic medium. The parallels to contemporary developments on the web are striking (http://tinyurl.com/c8t9a8)

Thank you so much for your post. I agree with you totally that the industry is too reluctant to invest in technology infrastructure and turn a snob's nose at the internet (instead of embracing it).
What about media as documentation? Isn't there some merit to having words and images permanently inked for future reference? But at the same time, how do we achieve that recording sustainably?
Also, how can we address accountability?
Isn't the Kindle a step in the right direction though?
hmmm...much to ponder

I'm skeptical the citizen-journalist model can work to replace local newspapers' role as "government watchdog." Uncovering city and state misdeeds takes time and investigative effort -- more effort than your local soccer parent tweeting the high school game. I suspect this requires full-time personnel time-wise, as well as an organization behind the journalist standing up to pressure not to report. That shouldn't be government funded, for obvious reasons. Non-profit / donation support seems unlikely to bring in enough money locally: This isn't the money maker for newspapers historically, but is a subsidized element (i.e. supported by ad revenue), which suggests people don't value it enough to pay directly for it.

Citizen-journalists can likely cover easily-covered news, but we're in trouble if nobody is relentlessly digging locally.

A followup datapoint -- when Denver's 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News went kaput earlier this year, a bunch of reporters and backers started an online-only site ( www.indenvertimes.com ) to try out the business model of an online site with real reporters etc. They said they needed 50,000 subscribers (at, IIRC, only $5/mo) to make it economically viable... and by their target date they had... 3,000.

They let go most of the staff and are apparently in a quandary what to do next.

This doesn't bode well for local watchdogging.

Just as I was sitting down to read The Blue Sweater on my Kindle (purchased wirelessly even though I have your paper copy), the mail carrier rings the doorbell with a five-pound box of TED books. I look at my Kindle, I look at your box... you get the picture. 2010?

Very compelling thoughts, Chris. But I think one thing you're doing here that's perhaps a bit broken is talking about journalism and cultural curation in the same breath. Because they are very different things. And traditional newspapers have historically been a blend of the two – but we're seeing a divergence as the broader construct of "news" moves online.

On the one hand, we have breaking news, usually event-based and more drily informative. Today's print media can't, of course, compete with that, given it takes multiple rounds of editing on top of actual print times to "break" a story, as opposed to a single click of a blog-publishing button online.

On the other, we have cultural curation – the "news" in the sense of cultural happening and artifacts and movements that matter, that are somehow changing how we relate to ideas and to the world at large. In print media, this can be anything from a listing of the week's theater performances in the back of the Sunday paper, to a great op-ed on a new art show at the MoMA, to a Rolling Stone album review. But there's even greater competition emerging here online, as various "cultural curators" carve out an authoritative place in just about every niche – design, technology, entertainment, science, you name it. So here, it doesn't come down to timing. It comes down to quality. To editorial judgment. To building a brand as a cultural curator – whether you're a publishing company (like said dear old BBC) or a person (like Guy Kawasaki or, well, you.) This product – "cultural curation" – is something that can live on any medium, be it print or traditional web or a new breed of interactive multimedia.

And "newspapers" won't be able to adapt and move forward, even with funding and an acceptance of participatory contribution, until they make sense of this divergence between "journalism" and "cultural curation" as products – and monetize THAT.

This brings me to something I've been thinking for a long time now – TED is a powerful brand of cultural curation. And even though you've done a phenomenal job of making sense and use of the online medium (Webby win, I'm looking at you), your "product" can be so much larger than that, than this linear model of medium-message. Why not a TED magazine? TED cable channel? TED SoHo gallery? TED lab at, say, MIT or CalTech? It all goes back to this model of all-encompassing cultural curation, and whether it comes to TED or big print brands like the NYT, it's a matter of translating the cultural shifts (like the divergence I talk about) to the appropriate media, not just chasing some "new" medium for the sake of it.

Here's a few small steps newspapers should take to survive and thrive in the digital age:
Newspapers should sell off their real estate holdings. Then they should give every reporter a laptop, pay for his or her mobile phone and Internet hook up. Then kick them all out of the newsroom. Let them work in coffeeshops, cafes, libraries and co-working establishments to connect with the community.
Every reporter should write a blog, join LinkedIn, create a Facebook page, Twitter and engage in the digital age.
Every reporter and editor should have a Kindle. It's the biggest innovation in our industry in years.
Like Google and IBM, give reporters and editors time to work on “skunk works” or projects that could end up drawing revenue and profits.
Reward innovation.
Brainstorm new ideas constantly in the newsroom. While it is important to engage readers and community members and tap into their expertise and ideas, it is equally important to tap into the ideas and knowledge base of professional journalists.
If you can’t beat them, join them. Join forces with Craigslist, Youtube.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and other technology partners to reach a wider audience.

another reason citizen-journalists may not work: ridiculously long, unedited rambling

Had an alert there was a new comment here, but I don't see one.

Anyway, I do have an update. I collected my thoughts on the impact of digitalization on journalism, specifically investigative journalism at the local level, with a call for solutions. For those interested, it's at:

http://critique.org/hellocorruption.ht

Ideas welcome.