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The Future of the News Business: A Monumental Twitter Stream All in One Place

28 points by aaronbrethorst 11y ago

gcb0 11y ago
running news was hard because it wasn't about breaking the latest crap in a knee jerk. Good newspaper differentiate by having a great analysis of yesterday news. with great writing and knowledge. tv had already brought most of the instant-and-dumb news. but there was at least a bit of source checking and a crude analysis on the late night news. now, it's 100% knee jerk breaking news. in less than 140 chars. if you call this the future, good luck. then the article just drones on a dumb list of "20 ways every office worker that has a blog already tried to monetize it". nothing new or noteworthy.
- ttctciyf 11y ago
  Back in 2008, British journalist Nick Davies was making noises[1] about how marketplace dynamics impact news standards: I commissioned research from specialists at Cardiff University, who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their “facts”, they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn’t be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these “facts” had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories. 12% of stories had been fact-checked - I wonder how that number will fare in the coming "big opportunity for the news industry [...] to increase its market size 100x AND drop prices 10X"? 1: http://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth-news/ http://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth-...
nl 11y ago
At the same time, the market size is dramatically expanding—many more people consume news now vs. 10 or 20 years ago. Many more still will consume news in the next 10 to 20 years. Volume is being driven up, and that is a big, big deal. Does Marc mean more people in the US consumer news now than before, or world wide? If it is world wide I think that is probably true (because of rising access and literacy if nothing else) but if it is in the US is it actually true? I imagine back in the 70's and 80's when everyone watched the nightly news and everyone subscribed to a paper the numbers would have been pretty high. It's an important point because Marc claims it is pushing up the amount of money in the market, but if it is international readers it isn't necessarily as simple. (It's not necessarily untrue, but much more complicated) One start would be to tear down, or at least modify the “Chinese wall” between content and the business side. Oh wow. I can see the outrage now.
- jameshart 11y ago
  Yes. And his point about global addressable market would make more sense if he first addressed the actual Chinese wall between Chinese people and news content.
mtbcoder 11y ago
Interesting that the author cites crowdfunding, philanthropy and subsidization as a means to fund news organizations, but fails to mention the great work done by NPR, PBS Newshour, Frontline, Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose, et al. Instead, the author chooses to highlight several outlets that are "doing it right" but who deploy the very same advertising schemes which the author derides earlier on in the article.
pron 11y ago
The problem with all those new approaches is understanding what a news organization is and how it operates. The author of this post mentions bundling, but bundling in a news organization isn't defined by customer needs but by operational needs. A news organization needs to have expert assets in various locales before news breaks out (so it's not the Baghdad bureau problem, but the Africa bureau problem or the India bureau problem). Bundling serves as a cross-subsidy. People pay a fixed (high) price for a bundled newspaper in order to read an interesting story, but that story may come from Paris one day and from Pakistan another. Once stories are unbundled, this can simply no longer work.
retube 11y ago
Not sure the Guardian is the best example. They well be growing online but no one is paying for that and they're haemorrhaging customers of the physical paper who actually pay for it.
mrdrozdov 11y ago
This was published over a year and a half ago, and I believe it was timed nicely with a16z's investment into BuzzFeed. I would argue that a Facebook stream looks more like the future than a Twitter stream these days (just look for the most prominent icon in the candidate debates). It might also be worth mentioning that quality may not be the right metric for news, rather it's probably consumption. Consumption is also easier to measure.
- mrdrozdov 11y ago
  As a follow up, here's one of my favorite articles on measuring journalism metrics. https://github.com/abelsonlive/_site_/blob/master/_posts/2013-07-25-One-year-after-finding-a-metric-for-news.md https://github.com/abelsonlive/_site_/blob/master/_posts/201... It also serves as an entry into the rabbit hole of this slippery topic.
thanatropism 11y ago
He cites both Business Insider and Pando as his own success stories. The folks from Pando (Paul Carr et al.) used to relentlessly mock Blodget and BI for their catastrophically bad journalism.

gcb0 11y ago

running news was hard because it wasn't about breaking the latest crap in a knee jerk. Good newspaper differentiate by having a great analysis of yesterday news. with great writing and knowledge. tv had already brought most of the instant-and-dumb news. but there was at least a bit of source checking and a crude analysis on the late night news. now, it's 100% knee jerk breaking news. in less than 140 chars. if you call this the future, good luck. then the article just drones on a dumb list of "20 ways every office worker that has a blog already tried to monetize it". nothing new or noteworthy.

ttctciyf 11y ago
Back in 2008, British journalist Nick Davies was making noises[1] about how marketplace dynamics impact news standards: I commissioned research from specialists at Cardiff University, who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their “facts”, they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn’t be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these “facts” had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories. 12% of stories had been fact-checked - I wonder how that number will fare in the coming "big opportunity for the news industry [...] to increase its market size 100x AND drop prices 10X"? 1: http://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth-news/ http://www.nickdavies.net/2008/02/05/introducing-flat-earth-...

nl 11y ago

At the same time, the market size is dramatically expanding—many more people consume news now vs. 10 or 20 years ago. Many more still will consume news in the next 10 to 20 years. Volume is being driven up, and that is a big, big deal. Does Marc mean more people in the US consumer news now than before, or world wide? If it is world wide I think that is probably true (because of rising access and literacy if nothing else) but if it is in the US is it actually true? I imagine back in the 70's and 80's when everyone watched the nightly news and everyone subscribed to a paper the numbers would have been pretty high. It's an important point because Marc claims it is pushing up the amount of money in the market, but if it is international readers it isn't necessarily as simple. (It's not necessarily untrue, but much more complicated) One start would be to tear down, or at least modify the “Chinese wall” between content and the business side. Oh wow. I can see the outrage now.

jameshart 11y ago
Yes. And his point about global addressable market would make more sense if he first addressed the actual Chinese wall between Chinese people and news content.

mtbcoder 11y ago

Interesting that the author cites crowdfunding, philanthropy and subsidization as a means to fund news organizations, but fails to mention the great work done by NPR, PBS Newshour, Frontline, Bill Moyers, Charlie Rose, et al. Instead, the author chooses to highlight several outlets that are "doing it right" but who deploy the very same advertising schemes which the author derides earlier on in the article.

pron 11y ago

The problem with all those new approaches is understanding what a news organization is and how it operates. The author of this post mentions bundling, but bundling in a news organization isn't defined by customer needs but by operational needs. A news organization needs to have expert assets in various locales before news breaks out (so it's not the Baghdad bureau problem, but the Africa bureau problem or the India bureau problem). Bundling serves as a cross-subsidy. People pay a fixed (high) price for a bundled newspaper in order to read an interesting story, but that story may come from Paris one day and from Pakistan another. Once stories are unbundled, this can simply no longer work.

retube 11y ago

Not sure the Guardian is the best example. They well be growing online but no one is paying for that and they're haemorrhaging customers of the physical paper who actually pay for it.

mrdrozdov 11y ago

This was published over a year and a half ago, and I believe it was timed nicely with a16z's investment into BuzzFeed. I would argue that a Facebook stream looks more like the future than a Twitter stream these days (just look for the most prominent icon in the candidate debates). It might also be worth mentioning that quality may not be the right metric for news, rather it's probably consumption. Consumption is also easier to measure.

mrdrozdov 11y ago
As a follow up, here's one of my favorite articles on measuring journalism metrics. https://github.com/abelsonlive/_site_/blob/master/_posts/2013-07-25-One-year-after-finding-a-metric-for-news.md https://github.com/abelsonlive/_site_/blob/master/_posts/201... It also serves as an entry into the rabbit hole of this slippery topic.

thanatropism 11y ago

He cites both Business Insider and Pando as his own success stories. The folks from Pando (Paul Carr et al.) used to relentlessly mock Blodget and BI for their catastrophically bad journalism.