Thanks to Mathew Ingram for crediting me with the observation, going back many years now, that the impact of the Internet on journalism is more than just a more efficient distribution system, of news to readers. It's also more efficient at routing information and ideas from sources of news to users of news. This is what I called Sources Go Direct.
I first really felt that when I was running an anchor desk from my house in California on 9/11. I had a great connection with lots of people who were in harm's way in NYC. I was able to make a contribution to the flow of news by simply routing it from the people who had it to the people who wanted it.
It wasn't hard. It was access journalism. I had access to the sources, and I just moved what they were reporting out onto the wire.
In reality that's all journalism ever was. Taking information from sources and publishing it. The Internet makes easier and less expensive. It takes all the glory out of it, which is a good thing imho.
As a software developer, through my work in blogging, podcasting and RSS, I have been able to make the tools better at supporting this model. And there's a way for the existing news industry to participate, but they are clinging to the outdated model, the idea that their front page is a thing. Point offsite from a river of the news sources you follow. That's how you create the next wave of news systems. The tech industry is going this way, quickly now. But it's still not too late.
I wonder if news organizations would feel less puzzled about rivers if they would picture one that included three kinds of feeds: 1) the best of their sources and competitors, 2) their own staff's reporting, and 3) a feed of brief pieces from their own shop, updated and re-posted as needed, that gather and introduce small clusters of the very best pieces on an issue they are following. That's not the front page of olden times, but it does sound like a page that journalists might immediately see as valuable and tempting to readers. You could sell advertising into that page, I bet.
Ken, last time I pitched the idea to a news org they told me they had a blog that pointed to bloggers, but no one ever read it. I tried to say as politely as possible -- that's not the idea -- but the discussion went no further. I can't read people's minds, but I'd say the problem is this -- they don't listen to this one. To me it's so obvious -- this is how the tech industry is killing you, you have to put up some resistance. But they don't think that way. I guess.
First time I pitched the river idea to a news org was with the NYT in 2006. I had just gotten a Blackberry, and loved it. I immediately did a NYT river for it, so I could read the news while I was riding BART. It blew me away. It only took a day to put it together. They had a mobile app already, it was a huge thing, required lots of navigation to find one story! I had a way to scroll through all the stories. I guess they had spent a lot of money on their app and didn't think something that could be done in a day was worth considering.
If we're lucky, someday the industry will figure it out and then have a season of sadness when they realize how long the concepts have been on the table ready to go.
It doesn't work that way. The other day I read a piece written by Marc Canter about how Adobe didn't feel they had enough time to port Director to the web, so they went with Flash instead. As a result, all the work that had been put into Director way beyond what Flash could do, was lost. I look at the same thing in the Frontier codebase. It's so far ahead of the runtime environment of the web, but that doesn't matter, because the web went a different way. Now I develop in a much more fragile environment and it goes much slower and we don't get as far. And in the end very few people use the result anyway. You saw that with Fargo , right? It's great, unique software. It could really help Dropbox or any of their competitors. But they wouldn't even meet with me to look at it! It's the way the world works. Progress comes slowly.
When they say tech is a meritocracy, this is what I think of. :-)