This link has been bookmarked by 144 people . It was first bookmarked on 14 Mar 2009, by Rohan Jayasekera.
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18 Feb 13
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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.
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Their underlying business model is being attacked by multiple forces, but their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking
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But their online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period.
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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.
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27 Nov 12
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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.
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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.
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The information lag went from months to days. In 1993
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which featured daily updates and commentary on everything from new printer driver releases to the future of the Mac clone business.
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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.
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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.
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It’s a much more diverse and interconnected world, a system of flows and feeds – completely different from an assembly line.
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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.
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Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself.
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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.
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When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists.
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because the new ecosystem of investigative journalism is in its infancy.
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I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism.
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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
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When the economy imploded in September, I followed economist bloggers like Brad DeLong to get their expert take the candidates’ responses to the crisis
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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
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. It would have been reduced to a minute-long soundbite on the evening news.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
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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.
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– our standards about what constitutes good local coverage are going to improve.
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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,
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and I don’t get an email alert about it within three hours, it will be a sign that something is broken.
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there is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered.
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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.
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It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper
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but I pride myself on being a very savvy information navigator
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Of course, we have thousands of these institutions. They’re called newspapers.
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their online audience is growing faster than their print audience is shrinking
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newspapers have never been more relevant.
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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.
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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.
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19 Mar 12
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27 Sep 11
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05 Sep 11
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25 Aug 11
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23 Jun 11
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13 Jun 11
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04 Jan 11
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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.
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This was obsessive behavior, I admit, but not entirely irrational
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it’s essential that we travel back to my holding pattern outside the College Hill Bookstore
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potentially devastating effect that the web is having on our news institutions.
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conversation about the future of news, we need to start by talking about the past.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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daily updates
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now I could get breaking news about the company directly from them, the second they announced it.
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with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech.
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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.
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there is more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
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Not the future of the news industry, or the print newspaper business: the future of news itself.
-
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.
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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?
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Consider another – slightly less nerdy -- case study: politics.
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Times would have a handful of stories about the campaign stops or debates or latest polls.
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stay up late soaking in the commentary from the assembled experts.
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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
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I watched the debates with a thousand virtual friends live-Twittering alongside me on the couch.
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which I watched via viral clips on the Web as much as I watched on TV.
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the ecosystem of political news also included information coming directly from the candidates
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Eight million people watched it on YouTube alone.
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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
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There are more perspectives; there is more depth and more surface now
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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.
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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.
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who were suddenly covering local news with a granularity that the Times had never attempted. Two
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The Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs, which is great
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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
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My guess is that the venerable tradition of the muckraking journalist will be alive
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It is far more complicated to navigate this new world than it is to sit down with your morning paper
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Can we expect the general public to navigate the new ecosystem with the same skill and discretion?
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01 Nov 10
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21 Oct 10
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t 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.
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e 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.
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The metaphor you hear now is different, more E.O. Wilson than McLuhan:
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the ecosystem
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barren desert. Today, it is a thriving rain forest
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more volume, diversity, timeliness, and depth.
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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.
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ecosystem of technology news is so crucia
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15 Jun 10
Matt YWhat the future of online journalism will be like.
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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.
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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.
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When you hear people sound alarms about the future of news, they often gravitate to two key endangered species: war reporters and investigative journalists.
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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.
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15 Feb 10
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02 Feb 10
bubbleviciousThoughts on how the news industry may change and redevelop itself.
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21 Jan 10
Ryan MurphyIt’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,
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18 Jan 10
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12 Jan 10
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30 Oct 09
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14 Jul 09
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07 Jul 09
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15 Jun 09
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19 May 09
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11 May 09
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05 May 09
richard sambrookThere 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. Ins
news journalism future digital internet USA business newspapers
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01 May 09
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30 Apr 09
jplamondonFuture news ecosystem.
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. -
22 Apr 09
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07 Apr 09
Nico Macdonald[Discusses experience of moving from buying an out-of-date monthly tech magazine to getting realtime information from the companies they covered, comparing the past desert with the present jungle of information.] I think that steady transformation from de
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04 Apr 09
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03 Apr 09
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Joseph KrausThe following is a speech Steve gave yesterday at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin.
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01 Apr 09
irwinchenpublicationdesign thenewreader news journalism
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31 Mar 09
lauren pressleytotally worth reading the whole thing (though it's long for a post). wondering if libraries could be part of the aggregator role.
news journalism future publishing media newspapers for:griffey import
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30 Mar 09
carlos guyotIf 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 i
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28 Mar 09
The following is a speech I gave yesterday at the South By Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin.
journalism media newspaper future news publishing technology business
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27 Mar 09
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26 Mar 09
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25 Mar 09
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Ari R"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
election_08 politics media journalism future technology publishing newspapers news local business hyperlocal stevenjohnson apple
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24 Mar 09
Mandy JenkinsHe doesn't say anything that's new, in particular, but the way he phrases what the role of newspapers and traditional journalists could be in this bright new future is truly well done.
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23 Mar 09
alison gow...The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in...
journalism newspapers online future trends SXSW delicious import
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22 Mar 09
Michael BeckerThis is the Steven Berlin Johnson speech that I wrote about in my blog post on March 22.
Steven Berlin Johnson journalism news media newspapers technology
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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.
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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.
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21 Mar 09
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Michel Bauwensthere is going to be more content, not less; more information, more analysis, more precision, a wider range of niches covered.
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20 Mar 09
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19 Mar 09
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18 Mar 09
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17 Mar 09
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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.
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Gordon HerdArticle on the future of news.
media news journalism technology history business future publishing
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16 Mar 09
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Howard Rheingold"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."
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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
-
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 re
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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
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15 Mar 09
Martin Stabe"I think it’s much more instructive to anticipate the future of investigative journalism by looking at the past of technology journalism ... It is the sub-genre of news that has had the longest time to evolve. The Web doesn’t have some kind intrinsic apti
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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.
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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
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print circulation had declined from 62 million to 49 million
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online audience has grown from zero to 75 million over that period.
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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.
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paul jonesThat 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 pa
jomc449 history news newspapers business media journalism publishing future sxsw
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