The following is a speech I gave yesterday at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin.
I
If you happened to be hanging out in front of the old College Hill Bookstore in Providence Rhode Island in 1987, on the third week of every month you would have seen a skinny 19-year-old in baggy pants, sporting a vaguely Morrissey-like haircut, walking into the bookstore several times a day.
That kid was me. I wish I could tell you that I was making those compulsive return visits out of a passionate love of books. While I do, in fact, have a passionate love of books, and bought plenty of them during my college years, I was making those tactical strikes on the College Hill Bookstore for another reason.
I was looking for the latest issue of MacWorld.
I had learned from experience that new issues of the monthly magazine devoted to all things Macintosh arrived at College Hill reliably in the third week of the month. Yes, you could subscribe, but for some reason, subscription copies tended to arrive a few days later than the copies in the College Hill bookstore. And so when that time of the month rolled around, I’d organize my week around regular check-ins at College Hill to see if a shipment of MacWorlds had landed on their magazine rack.
This was obsessive behavior, I admit, but not entirely irrational. It was the result of a kind of imbalance: not a chemical imbalance, an information imbalance. To understand what I want to say about the future of the news ecosystem, it’s essential that we travel back to my holding pattern outside the College Hill Bookstore -- which continued unabated, by the way, for three years. It’s essential to travel back because we’re in the middle of an epic conversation about the potentially devastating effect that the web is having on our news institutions. And so if we’re going to have a responsible conversation about the future of news, we need to start by talking about the past.
We need to be reminded of what life was like before the web.
I made my monthly pilgrimages to College Hill because I was interested in the Mac, which was, it should be said, a niche interest in 1987, though not that much of a niche. Apple was one of the world’s largest creators of personal computers, and by far the most innovative. But if you wanted to find out news about the Mac -- new machines from Apple, the latest word on the upcoming System 7 or HyperCard, or any new releases from the thousands of software developers or peripheral manufacturers -- if you wanted to keep up with any of this, there was just about one channel available to you, as a college student in Providence Rhode Island. You read MacWorld.
And even then, even if you staked out the College Hill Bookstore waiting for issues hot off the press, you were still getting the news a month or two late, given the long-lead times of a print magazine back then. Yes, if Apple had a major product announcement, or fired Steve Jobs, it would make it into the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal the next day. And you could occasionally steal a few nuggets of news by hanging around the University computer store. But that was pretty much it.
When I left college and came to New York in the early nineties, the technology channels began to widen ever so slightly. At some point in that period, I joined Compuserve, and discovered that MacWeek magazine was uploading its articles every Friday night at around six, which quickly became a kind of nerd version of appointment television for me. The information lag went from months to days. In 1993, Wired Magazine launched, and suddenly I had access not only to an amazing monthly repository of technology news, but also a new kind of in-depth analysis that had never appeared in the pages of MacWorld.
Within a few years, the web arrived, and soon after I was reading a site called Macintouch, which featured daily updates and commentary on everything from new printer driver releases to the future of the Mac clone business. Tech critics like Scott Rosenberg and Andrew Leonard at Salon wrote tens of thousands of words on the latest developments at Apple. (I wrote a few thousand myself at FEED.) Sometime around then, Apple launched its first official web site; now I could get breaking news about the company directly from them, the second they announced it.
We all know where this is headed, but let me spell it out just for the record. If 19-year-old Steven could fast-forward to the present day, he would no doubt be amazed by all the Apple technology – the iPhones and MacBook Airs – but I think he would be just as amazed by the sheer volume and diversity of the information about Apple available now. In the old days, it might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt. Writers like John Gruber or Don Norman regularly post intricate critiques of user interface issues. (I probably read twenty mini-essays about Safari’s new tab design.) The traditional newspapers have improved their coverage as well: think of David Pogue’s reviews, or Walt Mossberg’s Personal Technology site. And that’s not even mentioning the rumor blogs.
And of course, MacWorld is still around as a print magazine, but they also now have a web site. Yesterday alone, they published twenty-six different articles on Apple-related topics.
II
The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and we spent forty years trying to figure out how media was re-wiring our brains. The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan: the ecosystem. I happen to think that this is a useful way of thinking about what’s happening to us now: today’s media is in fact much closer to a real-world ecosystem in the way it circulates information than it is like the old industrial, top-down models of mass media. It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line. That complexity is what makes it so interesting, of course, but also what makes it so hard to predict what it’s going to look like in five or ten years. So instead of starting with the future, I propose that we look to the past.
To use that ecosystem metaphor: the state of Mac news in 1987 was a barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest. By almost every important standard, the state of Mac news has vastly improved since 1987: there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
I think that steady transformation from desert to jungle may be the single most important trend we should be looking at when we talk about the future of news. Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself. Because there are really two worst case scenarios that we’re concerned about right now, and it's important to distinguish between them. There is panic that newspapers are going to disappear as businesses. And then there’s panic that crucial information is going to disappear with them, that we’re going to suffer as culture because newspapers will no long be able to afford to generate the information we’ve relied on for so many years.
When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists. Will the bloggers get out of their pajamas and head up the Baghdad bureau? Will they do the kind of relentless shoe-leather detective work that made Woodward and Bernstein household names? These are genuinely important questions, and I think we have good reason to be optimistic about their answers. But you can’t see the reasons for that optimism by looking at the current state of investigative journalism in the blogosphere, because the new ecosystem of investigative journalism is in its infancy. There are dozens of interesting projects being spearheaded by very smart people, some of them nonprofits, some for-profit. But they are seedlings.
I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism. When ecologists go into the field to research natural ecosystems, they seek out the old-growth forests, the places where nature has had the longest amount of time to evolve and diversify and interconnect. They don’t study the Brazilian rain forest by looking at a field that was clear cut two years ago.
That’s why the ecosystem of technology news is so crucial. It is the old-growth forest of the web. It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic aptitude for covering technology better than other fields. It just has an intrinsic tendency to cover technology first, because the first people that used the web were far more interested in technology than they were in, say, school board meetings or the NFL. But that has changed, and is continuing to change. The transformation from the desert of Macworld to the rich diversity of today’s tech coverage is happening in all areas of news. Like William Gibson’s future, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
III
Consider another – slightly less nerdy -- case study: politics. The first Presidential election that I followed in an obsessive way was the 1992 election that Clinton won. I was as compulsive a news junkie about that campaign as I was about the Mac in college: every day the Times would have a handful of stories about the campaign stops or debates or latest polls. Every night I would dutifully tune into Crossfire to hear what the punditocracy had to say about the day’s events. I read Newsweek and Time and the New Republic, and scoured the New Yorker for its occasional political pieces. When the debates aired, I’d watch religiously and stay up late soaking in the commentary from the assembled experts.
That was hardly a desert, to be sure. But compare it to the information channels that were available to me following the 2008 election. Everything I relied on in 1992 was still around of course – except for the late, lamented Crossfire – but it was now part of a vast new forest of news, data, opinion, satire – and perhaps most importantly, direct experience. Sites like Talking Points Memo and Politico did extensive direct reporting. Daily Kos provided in-depth surveys and field reports on state races that the Times would never have had the ink to cover. Individual bloggers like Andrew Sullivan responded to each twist in the news cycle; HuffPo culled the most provocative opinion pieces from the rest of the blogosphere. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com did meta-analysis of polling that blew away anything William Schneider dreamed of doing on CNN in 1992. When the economy imploded in September, I followed economist bloggers like Brad DeLong to get their expert take the candidates’ responses to the crisis. (Yochai Benchler talks about this phenomenon of academics engaging with the news cycle in a smart response here.) I watched the debates with a thousand virtual friends live-Twittering alongside me on the couch. All this was filtered and remixed through the extraordinary political satire of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, which I watched via viral clips on the Web as much as I watched on TV.
What’s more: the ecosystem of political news also included information coming directly from the candidates. Think about the Philadelphia race speech, arguably one of the two or three most important events in the whole campaign. Eight million people watched it on YouTube alone. Now, what would have happened to that speech had it been delivered in 1992? Would any of the networks have aired it in its entirety? Certainly not. It would have been reduced to a minute-long soundbite on the evening news. CNN probably would have aired it live, which might have meant that 500,000 people caught it. Fox News and MSNBC? They didn’t exist yet. A few serious newspaper might have reprinted it in its entirety, which might have added another million to the audience. Online perhaps someone would have uploaded a transcript to Compuserve or The Well, but that’s about the most we could have hoped for.
There is no question in mind my mind that the political news ecosystem of 2008 was far superior to that of 1992: I had more information about the state of the race, the tactics of both campaigns, the issues they were wrestling with, the mind of the electorate in different regions of the country. And I had more immediate access to the candidates themselves: their speeches and unscripted exchanges; their body language and position papers.
The old line on this new diversity was that it was fundamentally parasitic: bloggers were interesting, sure, but if the traditional news organizations went away, the bloggers would have nothing to write about, since most of what they did was link to professionally reported stories. Let me be clear: traditional news organizations were an important part of the 2008 ecosystem, no doubt about it. I loved reading Frank Rich’s reliably sensible responses to each passing media frenzy; and certainly Katie Couric’s interview with Sarah Palin was every bit as important as Obama’s race speech in shaping our sense of the candidates. (Though I suspect Couric’s interview would have had much less impact without CBS’s viral distribution of the clips on the Web.) But no reasonable observer of the political news ecosystem could describe all the new species as parasites on the traditional media. Imagine how many barrels of ink were purchased to print newspaper commentary on Obama’s San Francisco gaffe about people “clinging to their guns and religion.” But the original reporting on that quote didn’t come from the Times or the Journal; it came from a "citizen reporter" named Mayhill Fowler, part of the Off The Bus project sponsored by Jay Rosen's Newassignment.net and The Huffington Post.
I think the political web covering the 2008 campaign was so rich for precisely the same reasons that the technology web is so rich: because it’s old-growth media. The first wave of blogs were tech-focused, and then for whatever reason, they turned to politics next. And so Web 2.0-style political coverage has had a decade to mature into its current state.
What’s happened with technology and politics is happening elsewhere too, just on a different timetable. Sports, business, reviews of movies, books, restaurants – all the staples of the old newspaper format are proliferating online. There are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now. And that’s the new growth. It’s only started maturing.
In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
But of course, that’s what the web can do. That’s one of the main reasons we created outside.in, because I found myself waking up in the morning and turning to local Brooklyn bloggers like Brownstoner, who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two years later, there are close to a thousand bloggers writing about Brooklyn: there are multiple blogs devoted to the Atlantic Yards real estate development; dozens following the Brooklyn foodie scene; music blogs, politics blogs, parenting blogs. The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great. As we get better at organizing all that content – both by selecting the best of it, and by sorting it geographically – our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve. We’re going to go through the same evolution that I did from reading two-month-old news in MacWorld, to expecting an instantaneous liveblog of a keynote announcement. Five years from now, if someone gets mugged within a half mile of my house, and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.
IV
So this is what the old-growth forests tell us: there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered. You can see the process happening already in most of the major sections of the paper: tech, politics, finance, sports. Now I suppose it’s possible that somehow investigative or international reporting won’t thrive on its own in this new ecosystem, that we’ll look back in ten years and realize that most everything improved except for those two areas. But I think it’s just as possible that all this innovation elsewhere will free up the traditional media to focus on things like war reporting because they won’t need to pay for all the other content they’ve historically had to produce. This is Jeff Jarvis’ motto: do what you do best, and link to the rest. My guess is that the venerable tradition of the muckraking journalist will be alive and well ten years from: partially supported by newspapers and magazines, partially by non-profit foundations and innovative programs like Newassignment.net, and partially by enterprising bloggers who make a name for themselves by breaking important stories.
Now there’s one objection to this ecosystems view of news that I take very seriously. It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper. There are vastly more options to choose from, and of course, there’s more noise now. For every Ars Technica there are a dozen lame rumor sites that just make things up with no accountability whatsoever. I’m confident that I get far more useful information from the new ecosystem than I did from traditional media along fifteen years ago, but I pride myself on being a very savvy information navigator. Can we expect the general public to navigate the new ecosystem with the same skill and discretion?
Let’s say for the sake of argument that we can’t. Let’s say it’s just too overwhelming for the average consumer to sort through all the new voices available online, to separate fact from fiction, reporting from rumor-mongering. Let’s say they need some kind of authoritative guide, to help them find all the useful information that’s proliferating out there in the wild.
If only there were some institution that had a reputation for journalistic integrity that had a staff of trained editors and a growing audience arriving at its web site every day seeking quality information. If only…
Of course, we have thousands of these institutions. They’re called newspapers.
The funny thing about newspapers today is that their audience is growing at a remarkable clip. Their underlying business model is being attacked by multiple forces, but their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking. As of January, print circulation had declined from 62 million to 49 million since my days at the College Hill Bookstore. But their online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period. Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant. If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.
This is what I think the ecosystem will ultimately look like:
Will this system be perfect? Of course not. But I think we have every reason to believe that it will be an improvement on the paradigm that we’ve been living with for the past century.
Let me say one final thing. I am bullish on the future of news, as you can tell. But I am not bullish on what is happening right now in the newspaper industry. It is ugly, and it is going to get uglier. Great journalists and editors are going to lose their jobs, and cities are going to lose their papers. There should have been a ten-year evolutionary process: the ecosystem steadily diversifying and establishing its complex relationships, the new business models evolving, the papers slowly transferring from print to digital, along with the advertisers. Instead, the financial meltdown – and some related over-leveraging by the newspaper companies themselves – has taken what should have been a decade-long process and crammed it down into a year or two. That is bad news for two reasons. First because it is going to inflict a lot of stress on people inside the industry who do great things, and who provide an important social good with their work. But it’s also bad news because it’s going to distract us from the long-term view; we’re going to spend so much time trying to figure out how to keep the old model on life support that we won’t be able to help invent a new model that actually might work better for everyone. The old growth forest won’t just magically grow on its own, of course, and no doubt there will be false starts and complications along the way. But in times like these, when all that is solid is melting into air, as Marx said of another equally turbulent era, it’s important that we try to imagine how we’d like the future to turn out and set our sights on that, and not just struggle to keep the past alive for a few more years.
So that’s why I wanted to take us back to the College Hill bookstore in 1987: to remind us that the emerging news ecosystem is already around us, and already doing wonderful things. Most of us in this room, I suspect, are already living in the old-growth forests now. It’s up to us to remind everyone else how promising those ecosystems really are -- or, even better, to help them live up to that promise.
Thanks
Posted by: scottrcrawford | March 14, 2009 at 08:21 AM
It was a really enjoyable session. Thanks for the book signing!!
Posted by: jabc | March 14, 2009 at 10:12 AM
The video of this talk can be found here:
http://is.gd/nlW0
Steven,
You seem to believe that there is a place for newspaper as an aggregator or filter for most of the population in the future. But isn't that naive? Does it mean this separation between bloggers and the newsrooms will always be maintained, however fabricated that divide might be?
In other words: is the general public somehow not interested or disconnected from the long tail which is exactly the part of the value proposition newspapers can't offer?
Thanks
Steven
Posted by: Steven Devijver | March 14, 2009 at 11:27 AM
This is a very important piece. Thank you, Stephen. I'm addicted to newspapers, like most of my generation, and I'm worried about their potential disappearance. And I take heart from many of your points here -- thanks for bringing some piece of mind.
And as you (and Marx) point out, we need to imagine the future; real fast. The forces destroying the newpapers are rapacious.
I think the fundamental question is a business question, who's going to pay the reporters? The papers may go away, but reporting is serious profession that cannot rely on stay-at-home-volunteers, sometimes known as bloggers.
Even if we have reliable (?) neighborhood reporting from local activists and bloggers, we also need compensated professionals for the bigger stuff: city, statewide, national, and international. They don't need to work for a newspaper, but somebody's got to pay for them and for their reporting expenses.
The answer will probably include ad supported news sites, which aren't as yet economically feasible. Or subscription news like the WSJ, although this will be a tough sell to a general audience. Experiments like spot.us may provide an answer for longer, investigative pieces; but not the day to day from Bagdad.
We don't go to movies made by amateur directors (well...), we rarely read books by volunteer writers. Instead of pajama-wearing opinionators like those of us posting comments here, professional reporters are going to have to report the important news. We should have already learned that from the ruins of another Old Growth culture, talk radio.
Rush Limbaugh is not going to be at the scene of the next 911; love John Stewart, but he's not going to uncover the Madoff scandal, and neither Joe Trippi nor Guy Kawasaki is going to Kentucky to investigate mine safety.
Seems to me that traditional, competitive, professional reporting is essential to civic democracy. Who's going to pay its reporters? I'm reasonably trustful the marketplace will give us an answer.
Posted by: CampfireSteve | March 14, 2009 at 12:36 PM
Steven: sorry about the "Stephen", I have the reverse problem, and this just underlines my point that amateurs are not good reporters.
Posted by: CampfireSteve | March 14, 2009 at 12:38 PM
Right on, Steven. And I don't think you'll have to wait five years to get those e-mail alerts about muggings around your house; sites like EveryBlock.com are already laying the groundwork for block-specific news. In fact, in some cities, something very close to that *already* exists! One example: http://charlotte.everyblock.com/police-calls/
The technology infrastructure for a neighborhood-level information distribution system already exists. It's just a matter of data availability -- which just isn't evenly distributed yet.
Posted by: Adrian Holovaty | March 14, 2009 at 01:27 PM
News is the ashes of the efforts of the innovators, agitators, instigators, perpetrators, et al, the typical cable news fodder.
Despite the voluminous Web chat about Apple products, they are far from what they could be. Your talk is all about reporting and not about transformation. I guess if you're one of those trying to sell something, a book maybe, you want to be savvy to buzzpolitik. A loud bang in the echo chamber.
What would be truly impressive would be the ability of Web participants to have products and services created for their needs. Screw the soviet ministries of cell phone carriers. No more silos, don't make us jailbreak your products.
Your diagram shows a whole lot of nothing being accomplished. Just more chatter to fill the news cycle.
Posted by: Bill Koslosky, MD | March 14, 2009 at 07:30 PM
The internet is a communications platform that's here to marry or modify existing platforms including cell/land phones, radio, television and media. The problem with the newspaper business is that it didn't recognize this shift in its market or properly adapt to it. Now it's reaching a dire state. It's no different than the steamship disrupting the paddle boat world.
All the industry needs to do is recognize it's environment has shifted, and focus on what it will take to migrate its customer base to the new platform. It's not difficult. Retail business is a case study for how to transition from a traditional platform to a new one. Not nearly as much has changed about users, the audience and the way the world works. It's just a different platform, and companies need to take a platform focused approach.
Lots of industries have/are being disrupted by the web but the demise of a business entirely is still optional.
Posted by: patricia | March 15, 2009 at 03:19 AM
Thanks Stev. This is a terrific analysis. You said so well what I have been stumbling around trying to articulate here in Chicago. Thanks to the beauty of the web, I was able to read your comments and will be able to see a video of you presenting the day after the event- glorious access to information! At a Poynter Institute event here in Chicago yesterday, the reality you describe was coming sharply into focus in the discussion. It is so sad that newspapers and some other legacy media do not see the preciousness of their brands and how important it is to preserve THAT so they have a place in the new ecosystem. Newspapers don't need to go more deeply into the "swamp" of disinformation to have a role in the new forest. They need to do a LOT more of what they do well and spread cooperatively through their value systems instead of competing the old line hierarchical way. Unfortunately, some newspapers like the Sun-Times where I used to work have been sucked dry of their newsroom resources by their business operating model. If you are operated by a hedge fund, all they want is a dollar return. They don't see or value the social return. that is what I am on the soap box for the new L3C hybrid for news businesses.. It's great to hear your vision and here in Chicago, theree are many of us who get it and want to see a healthy ecosystem develop. By the way, I wrote about you guys when I was at the Sun-Times in 2007..
Posted by: sallyd | March 15, 2009 at 06:34 AM
nice try at reading the tea leaves.
the descriptives of the past were amusing and on point.
the future, however, will not be the old guard as aggregators. they have lost much of their brand(and trust) for putting out mediocrity in order to line their own pockets. the public has spoken. they will not return.
to use your old growth theory..
when the big trees topple, the sunshine they dominated for so long will be spread evenly amongst smaller, more adaptive, more short-lived entities. there will be a free for all of competition. a few new ones will arise to dominate the sunlight again. it wont be he newspapers we continue to harken back to.
Posted by: eric | March 15, 2009 at 08:20 AM
I like the thinking. Similar to something I wrote:
http://parallax.blogs.com/parallax_calculating_tech/2008/06/editor-20.html
Posted by: Niel Robertson | March 15, 2009 at 12:33 PM
This is a fascinating, if not grievous point of view; not as to pass judgment in a negative sense, but as a view of the future embraced by the influences of established doctrine procurers. One can note the explosive influence of e-formed communication devices (blogs ect.) as the accelerant fueling the move toward a tiered internet; where influence is maintained (or re-established) based on access, or the ability to limit vantage points. Absent curtailed access, one would need the acumen of an actuary to compute the sophisticated sequences which are quickly producing the stresses on traditional mainstream media.
Posted by: Rico | March 15, 2009 at 12:42 PM
A very insightful piece. And here's the PS: The College Hill Bookstore is no more, a victim of exactly the type of migration to new journalism (new media, new reading habits, etc.) that are so well explained here, and so profoundly exciting. As wonderful as this new world is, it's sorrowful that we've lost the College Hill Bookstores of the world.
Posted by: Dan Woog | March 15, 2009 at 06:27 PM
You are really on the mark here. As a small business owner who is struggling to decide WHERE to put my advertising dollars, it's apparent to me there's a HUGE hole in the online community news sector. If the sites existed where I am, I would advertise there without a doubt. I know they will be everywhere eventually, but right now we are in transition.
Posted by: maggie | March 16, 2009 at 08:37 AM
Just one question: how are you going to get the money to flow to support content creators, and in proportion to the value of their content?
Posted by: David Merkel | March 16, 2009 at 09:49 AM
Several years ago, I put together an exhibit called "The Art of the Message" about the evolution of the modern newspaper as a graphic medium (recently, Maria Popova of the brilliant Brain Pickings blog wrote about it - lots of good art here: http://tinyurl.com/c8t9a8). It was based on a rare, private, rag-edition run of Chicago Tribunes from the late 19th century through WWII. The show started off with a front page from 1871, in which 6 1/2 out of 7 columns were devoted to ads (post-fire, any income was income...). The only news story on the page, in what must have been 2 pt type, included a crude illustration etched into the printing plate to help explain a vintage Chicago news story: ballot box-stuffing.
A hundred years ago the newspaper as we know it was being invented. The Tribune turned out to be a pretty good case study in part because of its stunning vertical integration (the company owned forests in Canada for making newsprint and mixed its own inks) and unabashed sense of self-important mission (until a graphic designer who shall remain nameless took an exacto blade to it in the 1970s, "World's Greatest Newspaper" was part of the masthead - for trivia buffs, that's what Tribune-owned radio station WGN's call letters stand/stood for).
There are stunningly parallels to what journalists, designers, advertisers and publishers were experimenting with in newspapers - the world's first truly mass medium - a century ago, and what's been happening on the web over the last decade. There was an energy and a willingness to stretch boundaries that frankly hasn't been seen in some time.
The optimism of your post had precedent: Until the modern newspaper happened, most people would never have imagined it possible. I'll think of your post daily as I pick my Tribune, mostly out of habit and now with an increasing sense of watch-the-train-wreck horror.
However... there is one angle to the discussion that doesn't seem to come up much. News organizations not only provided livelihoods for journalists, but funded legal teams to protect them. As can seen already in many places around the world (Russia, China, Sri Lanka - http://tinyurl.com/95vce9), a free press is never a given. It's that much easier to intimidate and marginalize journalists working on their own. I don't know what the answer is, but the loss of protective organizational cover presents a real challenge.
Full disclosure: I edit a news aggregator that focuses on health issues, humanitarian work and technology that relates to both (http://www.TrackerNews.net) It has a few twists. 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.
In a sense, it is sort of a "slow food, artisanal" version of a semantic web, with (as Steve Baker put it), the human algorithm tossed back into the equation. It's definitely an experiment-in-process.
We're in the process of determining whether to finish up a "custom tracker" tool we've been playing with. Tracker's back end UI is drag-n-drop wysiwyg, which makes it easy for anyone to get onto it quickly. If anyone's interested in finding out more, I can be contacted through the TrackerNews site.
Posted by: J.A. Ginsburg | March 16, 2009 at 01:17 PM
Fao Dan Woog.
http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=261
A DIY, self-service hyper-niche/local ad system...
Posted by: RickWaghorn | March 16, 2009 at 01:39 PM
What about local news that only locals care about? Who's going to keep an eye on the shenanigans in the Ottumwa school board, or the Peoria city council? How will the web provide that, along with real estate values, police blotters, and other information that we need?
Posted by: Mark | March 16, 2009 at 03:55 PM
"Now, what would have happened to that speech had it been delivered in 1992?.... Fox News and MSNBC? They didn’t exist yet."
Hmm...not that it's particularly relevant to the discussion here, but this does make me wonder who I was editing news for in 1992. The checks did say "Fox News."
Posted by: Jeff Bragg | March 17, 2009 at 06:00 AM
I've repeatedly heard the "Baghdad bureau" discussion, and as the owner of what's probably (today) the only online newspaper covering a major Army installation -- the Pulaski County Daily News at www.pulaskicountydaily.com outside Fort Leonard Wood -- I think those people who don't know the military are ignoring the tremendous amount of blogging that **ALREADY** goes on with active duty soldiers as well as civilian contractors.
And quite frankly, when I finally left print journalism last year after 19 years to start an online newspaper, an important underlying factor was that most of the servicemembers who were reading me were reading me ONLINE, not with printed copies of the Waynesville Daily Guide. The print newspaper for which I worked had a dozen paying subscribers on Fort Leonard Wood, but I probably had a dozen soldiers a day tell me they were reading my articles online who usually had never seen a printed copy.
Let's face it -- soldiers are young and that means they're even more internet-savvy than the general civilian populace and less interested in print media. It's possible to retire with a good pension and health insurance after 20 years in uniform, which means 38 for enlisted and 42 for officers. And at West Point, they're giving cadets computers and telling them to read the New York Times online. Even the older soldiers such as the installation chaplain, a full colonel in his early 50s, told me he'd been reading my articles online.
Fort Leonard Wood routinely has major units deployed to Iraq. I can't possibly afford to send an embedded reporter to cover the 5th Engineer Battalion (that opportunity has been offered) but I am trying right now to find ways to effectively cover our soldiers in Iraq.
The simple fact now is that we cover the civilian life of what soldiers are doing off-post as well as major on-post events, but I am not convinced that blogging by active duty soldiers and civilian contractors, combined with what the Arab media are doing very aggressively to present their point of view, can't provide at least as good coverage of our active duty military as what the civilian media are doing now -- which is, frankly, not much.
Posted by: Darrell Todd Maurina | March 17, 2009 at 08:30 AM
Good post!
Posted by: Boom | March 17, 2009 at 08:39 AM
By the way, I linked to your blog here:
http://pulaskicountyweb.com/smf/index.php?topic=15381.new#new
I have a running commentary section called "Media Meltdown" on the Pulaski County Web, another community discussion site in our county whose owner is my webmaster, and a lot of people in rural Missouri have been quite interested in seeing these links to the state of the news media in larger cities.
A commenter above asked who will cover the Ottumwa or Peoria school boards. That's an important and legitimate question.
My answer? If I can cover the Laquey, Crocker, Dixon, Richland, Plato and Swedeborg school districts -- all of which have less than 1,000 students -- as well as our county's main district (Waynesville) with about 5,000 students, surely some business entrepreneur in Peoria or Ottumwa can come up with a way to pay one or two full-time reporters to cover their school boards and city councils online.
And by the way, I do understand Iowa -- I used to live there, and years ago thought my ideal job would be to work for a daily newspaper in the Dutch Reformed country of northwest Iowa or as a suburban reporter for the Des Moines Register while living in Pella. I was a reporter in Iowa until I turned down three different news jobs in smaller cities than Peoria or Ottumwa to move to Fort Leonard Wood and cover the Army after the 9/11 terrorist sttack.
Posted by: Darrell Todd Maurina | March 17, 2009 at 09:02 AM
You are yet another geek, looking through the geek keyhole, and extrapolating from your experience of how tech news and information can or should disseminate and imagining this provides a model for all news and news organizations.
It doesn't.
Techs wanted information to be free because they saw it as vital to tech development *itself* -- they were very self-interested in their destruction of the private property of "freedom of the press which belongs to him who owns one".
The tech talk about tech is mainly about the Internet which easily spreads it. An 8,000 word piece has value; a tweet has value in the technology development process, which can pay for itself by selling the machines, or selling the knowledge to code the machines, and doesn't have to worry if the infosphere around that process is paid for or not. You're paid to blog not by the ads here, but by your consulting or your big IT company.
But...Local and international news isn't like tech news; it's much more expensive to get as it requires basic hoofing around the ward and making cold calls and triangulating lots and lots of sources. It's not just "oh wow I used this new iphone and here's my experience" it's more like "oh, all the relief agencies are expelled from Sudan, what's happening?". Very, very different newscape and skills required to gather information (you don't just point and click) and very, very different business model (no big IT company waiting in the wings to pay for all tech talk and all tech mags -- itself a problem of bias in tech journalism).
Tech talk, tech journalism, tech business models -- these are only the externals of news, they are not its core. The core is still about talking to *people*, not machines, and making organic value judgements, not scraping data produced by web analytics.
The fact that 13 million wired Obama supporters raised bunches of money from Silicon Valley doesn't change that; that's only 10 percent of the people who voted for Obama. And they represent a far greater spectrum of people and interests than you might be prepared to believe. Having Huffpo or the Daliy Kos or Scoble to push Obama and presumably funnel your agenda points in the future into his Blackberry is not enough of a structure to run a country or create a space for leaders and ordinary people to persuade diverse interest groups in a society about complex policies -- which is the role of the newspaper.
The ecosystem of tech talk and tech press, which you were able to forcibly overlay on to politics through the Obama machine is just one ecosystem. It's not *the* ecosystem. While you're imagining Silicon Valley has produced a machine for ruling the country (destroy newspapers, get everyone in a Facebook group), Fox News and talk radio trundles on, not really injured in your destructive war on paid content. If anything, the most liberal press is your technology's first victim. The web cannot replace the Village Voice, which, while free, paid its expenses with the ads -- the ads that craigslist took away from it. Your breath-takingly naive plan to just let investigative and international reporting go to, oh, I dunno, Al-Jazeera and Kremlin-owned news sites and be regurgitated faithfully on leftist blogs, isn't going to happen because Fox News or some other conservative force like it won't let it happen, and the liberal cause will actually lose, not win.
Newsassignment.net is definitely not a substitute for anything approaching a newspaper. It's a college blog. It has stories about...social media. It has hugely skewed political rants about the Middle East -- not local or national news of the civic import you claim will now be covered by projects like this.
As for your notion that this "more complex" set of ecosystems -- and yes, there will be more than the one tech ecosystem where you thrive and are comfortable -- will somehow require more effort to navigage, I guess you never heard of the Google news reader. And what will happen, as that news reader fills up with a 1,000 feeds, as there will be -- there already are -- news aggregators and feed readers who are like Scoble and the News Gang with way more power to rebroadcast than they themselves even realize they have (go and check how many mindless cows re-tweet them without ANY discussion). The newspapers *could* be the authoritative source -- but the Silicon Valley A-lister blogs are too busy destroying and trashing them with the help of their East Coast Marxist professor friends.
The system you outline is not only 'not perfect" it's dangerous. Because under the guise of a long-tail wiki-culture democracy, it actually encourages mindless re-tweeting by confused consumers, consumption-to-content ratios of 90 percent to 10 percent and brand and actor confusion -- which of course lovers of Actor Network Theory, who think all knowledge resides in the network, without much of an individual's role, will only be too happy to see happen.
Your tears for the ugliness of what's happening to newspapers are crocodile tears, as you represent a class of people -- the geek, the Mac lover, the Internet news maker and consumer -- who actively, gleefully helped it to happen. What you will be surprised -- shocked -- to see is ultimately how the forces you thought you suppressed or persuaded, all those SUV drivers and born-agains, grab the tools bad and the rump of the old media and have a good long run with it.
Shame on you for quoting Marx -- Marx who created the virtual world of communism imposed on people violently -- and whose works justified the massacres of millions. No one needs figures like Marx to "imagine" the future, thank you very much.
The struggle to "keep the past alive" as you disparagingly call it will in fact be a struggle of the new -- against the 150-year-old ancient, outmoded doctrine of communism Marx helped built which today survives as the conservative technocommunist doctrine of technology (it's anything but progressive as an ideology). And you will see your tools misused by people you call fascists. And you will see both old and new combine in ways that will remove power above all from you first -- and you thought social Darwinism is something that only happens to other people, never yourselves.
Posted by: Prokofy Neva | March 17, 2009 at 09:07 AM
Hi Steven, great piece. I think your ecosystem is correct and that it will call for some real rethinking about the nature of journalism - perhaps even its death and rebirth?
Hope you can swing by and take a look...
http://eaves.ca/2009/03/17/journalism-in-an-open-era/
Posted by: David Eaves | March 17, 2009 at 10:03 AM
The college hill bookstore closed a few years ago. It's a cheesy thrift store now. Not like it used to be at all. Anyway, I don't think I remember you hanging out there maybe I didn't see you because I had my nose stuck in the sci-fi section.
Posted by: Scott Carney | March 19, 2009 at 08:57 AM