Wednesday, February 26, 2014; 2:20:44 PM Eastern
The future of news
- I read two pieces today that stimulated a 14-minute podcast.
- #### The two pieces
- 1. Jeff Jarvis: Philanthropy and news.
- 2. Marc Andreessen on the future of the news business.
- #### Basic ideas
- 1. 20th century news was about information flowing through small numbers of reporters to large numbers of readers.
- 2. This was necessitated by the technology, which was one-to-many.
- 3. 21st century technology doesn't have this limit.
- 4. Advertising is evolving, it's becoming more like a todo list to follow up on the things you're interested in.
- 5. Eventually you will be able to write your own queries, and have companies make offers to you. This is the model Doc Searls has been talking about for years.
- 6. Perfectly targeted ads are just information.
- 7. News organizations will evolve too.
- 8. Their mission is to make information flow effective.
- 9. To facilitate, as before, but with far more writers. Open, like Wikipedia is open.
- 10. The quality of a news org will be in its writing, research, integrity. Their challenge is to scale that to meet the demand, and the capabilities of the new technology.
- 11. Old thinking -- news writing is exclusive.
- 12. New way -- news is written by many (but nowhere near everyone).
- 13. The power of a news organization is limited by the capacity of the wires. An organization like the NYT has more than a small interest in making the infrastructure of Manhattan world class. Right now it's far from it.
- #### Comments
- 1. It's kind of amazing that Bloomberg of all people didn't get this. He was a three-term mayor, while NYC fell far behind the rest of the world.