3 ms·

Thats a really good point. I see what your saying about the decoupling of straight news and journalism and it seems reasonable in a number of situations (tech

Thats a really good point. I see what your saying about the decoupling of straight news and journalism and it seems reasonable in a number of situations (tech news, local news, political news, etc...). But there are situations where this model isn't feasible. Two that come to mind: 1) Investigate journalism. In this case, someone is digging for facts and looking for connections. Tweeting, or any other instant platform, may not be the right medium for this. This looks like one area where news and journalism would need to remain intertwined. 2) Reporting from dangerous areas or areas without good wireless coverage. If someone is reporting facts from Darfur, it seems unlikely that any instant publishing platform could work. Still, it appears you are probably right for a large number of situations. It looks like the situations I'm describing would need to stay closer to the current model for some time.

coffeemug 17y ago
I agree with both of these points, although I don't think of the first situation as "news" at all (in a sense that it isn't necessarily dealing with current events that require time sensitive delivery). I think what you're digging at here is that you can't just provide a platform for freelance writers to write their pieces and pay them according to popularity - this model doesn't cover all cases. If there is demand for investigative journalism (which often, but not always, requires funding and cooperation) and reporting from dangerous areas, organizations would have to form that fund these endeavors. But, no matter how profitable this might be, this isn't a scalable business, so it isn't lucrative from a startup's point of view. It sounds like organizations like Associated Press will eventually transition to handle scenario two, which they'll publish via Twitter (once it lets content providers monetize their content), and some newspapers will transition to scenario one (once one top-brand newspaper or a startup builds a value-added publishing platform). The rest of the newspapers will simply die and many of the good writers will transition to a freelance model. Of course this gets very fuzzy very quickly, so most of these predictions will likely not pan out this way, but it seems pretty clear where the overall trend is going - technology will decouple a few concepts that are tightly coupled today. News would be decoupled from high quality written content, and production of content will be decoupled from its publishing and delivery.

coffeemug 17y ago

I agree with both of these points, although I don't think of the first situation as "news" at all (in a sense that it isn't necessarily dealing with current events that require time sensitive delivery). I think what you're digging at here is that you can't just provide a platform for freelance writers to write their pieces and pay them according to popularity - this model doesn't cover all cases. If there is demand for investigative journalism (which often, but not always, requires funding and cooperation) and reporting from dangerous areas, organizations would have to form that fund these endeavors. But, no matter how profitable this might be, this isn't a scalable business, so it isn't lucrative from a startup's point of view. It sounds like organizations like Associated Press will eventually transition to handle scenario two, which they'll publish via Twitter (once it lets content providers monetize their content), and some newspapers will transition to scenario one (once one top-brand newspaper or a startup builds a value-added publishing platform). The rest of the newspapers will simply die and many of the good writers will transition to a freelance model. Of course this gets very fuzzy very quickly, so most of these predictions will likely not pan out this way, but it seems pretty clear where the overall trend is going - technology will decouple a few concepts that are tightly coupled today. News would be decoupled from high quality written content, and production of content will be decoupled from its publishing and delivery.