Wednesday April 13, 2022; 12:50 PM EDT
- Sources Go Direct is a concept I've been promoting for a long time, without a simple one-page explanation of what it means. Here's my attempt to solve that problem. #
- The term focuses on the flow of news. Before the web news flowed from sources to reporters to readers. Some readers were sources of course. And sometimes reporters were sources. #
The web disintermediated news reporting as it did to other things. It's a fancy word that means that people went around the intermediaries. So travel agents which used to be a big thing, were replaced with Expedia and Kayak. We got information about real estate from Zillow. And the sources of reporters got blogs, and then Twitter accounts, and started going directly to the users of news. Of course there still are travel agents, and when I bought a house recently I used an agent to help me, but I did a lot of researching myself on Zillow. And there are still reporters, of course, and they use the tools that sources use, that's how they get the information they pass on to their readers. We're much better informed these days about lots of things. Some info we get through intermediaries and some we get directly.#- In the late 90s and into the 00s, we needed the term Sources Go Direct to focus our reporter friends on the role bloggers were playing. They jumped to the conclusion that we were trying to be reporters. Most of us were not. We had expertise we wanted to share that wasn't getting out through journalism. So we took matters into our own hands as soon as the technology gave us the means to. #
- In my case, I was making Mac software in 1994 and reporters were saying there was no new Mac software. I wanted to correct that misunderstanding, so I started what eventually came to be called a blog, and then podcasting. All to get around a clogged bottleneck of news flow about something that was important to me.#