Emergent Business Networks

Is The Article Like The Song Or The Album? Deconstructing The News #futureofnews #wjchat June 9, 2011

Painters create paintings, musicians create songs, authors write books, developers create systems, entrepreneurs create companies and…journalists write articles. Well, maybe not. Some people are questioning this assumption.

When a disruptive technology comes along it always changes the legacy medium. For example, the invention of the camera forced painters to rethink how they could add value and that led to impressionism, abstract art and other wonderful forms of creative experimentation.

When digital music arrived, it destroyed the concept of an album which started with the 33rpm vinyl format and carried on into CD.

But digital music did not deconstruct further, the song remains the unit that is produced & consumed.

In the news business, the album is the newspaper or the TV/Radio channel. Apart from a few loyalists among the older crowd, online news consumers are not brand loyal, they click around to  get what they want. But the article is still the dominant unit.

Blogging did not change that. Bloggers may write shorter articles, because they have to churn out 4 posts per day. Bloggers may call them posts rather than articles. Bloggers may have found the Publish key a huge liberation from the Publisher’s rejection letter. But, call it what you like, Bloggers still produce articles.

But Twitter may have changed things. Twitter is so fundamentally new as a medium that it challenges older assumptions. A Tweet is emphatically not an article. You can derisively dismiss Tweets as “brain farts” and a lot of them fit that bill. But in the news business, Tweets are one type of “news fragment”. I don’t know what else to call them. Some of these news fragments can become the constituent pieces of an article. That is what all the curation tools are trying to do, assemble Tweets into stories (which are built into the article form factor).

Compare this to other media that deliver creative work:

• the fragments in a song are things like the bass line, vocals etc.
• the fragments in a painting are things like paint and canvas
• the fragments in a book are things like paragraphs and chapters

In those media, would you be interested in consuming the fragments on their own? If you are a creator, maybe. If you play the bass, you might want to isolate Jacob Pastorious’s bass lines from Weather Report to learn from them.

That is the problem we have in the news business. Millions of people love writing. That is what made blogging such a phenomenon. I get it, I love writing. The act of creation is a pleasure. The act of consumption is OK, but not as much fun as creation. So when we see those news fragments, we become fascinated.

When people who are not involved in media and technology ask me why I am fascinated by Twitter, I usually talk about following the early days of a massive story. I was totally glued to Twitter #jan25 when the revolution was happening in Egypt. I have always been fascinated by revolutions, I have lived in the Lebanon and I am fascinated by the news business. So this was exciting to me on many levels.

But as soon as Nick Kristof got to Cairo, I was happy to just read his articles as well as anything by other journalists who really understand the Middle East like Thomas Friedman.

I can also envisage that somebody who is obsessively interested in all things Apple related, they want to drill down to the fragment/source. But how many subjects can we be obsessive about? How many subjects do we want to be “news prosumers” in?

I think the article will remain, like the song and the painting, the primary unit of production and consumption. Journalists, bloggers and what we might call “news prosumers” or “news fanatics” might want to delve deeper into the individual fragments, to go direct to the sources.

That use case, the news prosumer, needs to be catered to. It is really a filter/check box indicated whether you consider yourself an expert on that subject. The expert will get all the latest stuff in reverse chronological order, getting the fragments direct from sources (using their own insights and knowledge to filter out the junk). But methinks that is a minor use case. Those of us in the news business might think it is a big use case as we fall into that use case category, but that is a classic mistake. Also, I think that most mainstream media attempts at doing this will be rejected by the news prosumer fanatics, who will always want to delve direct into the fragments direct from the sources.

In conclusion:

The article like the song remains the same, even while the container (newspaper/channel/CD) is threatened.

Reporter, Journalist, Editor, Publisher: The Blurring Of Roles #futureofnews May 28, 2011

Reporter used to be synonymous with journalist. Recently, people have started to refer to reporter as a “citizen journalist”. The implication is that journalists are not “on the ground” reporting on what they see and hear at first hand, they are sitting at a desk curating flows from reporters who are unpaid. Calling unpaid reporters citizen journalists makes little sense, the term is overdue for retirement.

But the implication is that the journalist has actually become an editor, deciding what to publish from a team of reporters. Actually the journalist is also the publisher. When I am finished writing I simply hit my WordPress Publish button. It is free and I can have advertising networks sell some ads. I don’t need to manage a sales team and the accounting is simply checking into Paypal. I am oversimplifying a tad to make a point. But all the “media companies formerly known as bloggers” started a single individual who was journalist, editor and publisher at the same time.

This empowerment is the wonderful legacy of the social media age.

But something has been lost. We have lost the reporter. Maybe it is simply a budget issue. Unless it is a massive global story, like a revolution or Tsunami, nobody is paying for the reporter to fly to the spot. So our typical image of a blogger is somebody sitting in their home office on a laptop, reading news feeds and press releases. There are more PR people than journalists. Everybody is recycling the same old stuff. The tech blogosphere is canary in the coal mine. Any news release from a tech bigco has 10 or more news stories that are almost all the same, competing only on speed of release and link bait cleverness of the headline.

The only exceptions in the tech blogosphere are Arrington and Scoble. The Arrington story is not repeatable. He basically creates news by starting a controversy. He is so wired in the Valley that he can do this. This is either horribly conflicted or the return of Gonzo journalist; Arrington as a reincarnation of Hunter S. Thompson is a pretty funny thought. But that idea won’t scale as the VCs say.

But what Scoble does, travel the world interviewing entrepreneurs, is scalable. This is original content, proprietary, the essence of what we used to call reporting. He can do this because Rackspace pays his salary and expenses. That is a scary thought for media organizations; the future of journalism is coming from a company that is byepassing media companies to establish their own direct access to the market.

But whether the future creators of original content are media companies or “the companies formerly known as advertisers and now called content marketers”, the Scoble-like reporter needs better tools for the whole lifecycle from original reporting to publishing and monetization.

Disclosure: that is the focus of ReportingLiveFrom and this has not been launched yet. For more background, see these earlier posts:

Investigative Journalism Needs More Than Curation Tools

Twitter Is Not Enough: 6 Needs Of Investigative Journalism