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Former NYT journalist here. I'm really glad the paper is experimenting like this. I want to make a slightly bolder statement than the headline of the post: Th
by vonnik 11y ago
Former NYT journalist here. I'm really glad the paper is experimenting like this.
I want to make a slightly bolder statement than the headline of the post:
The future of news is not written, and it's not one way. It's conversational and spoken.
We've been migrating away from the printed word at least since the advent of radio, and TV only accelerated that trend.
What people want is the interaction and surprise and meaning created in a conversation. Papers like the NYT aspire to "drive the conversation." But they are not engaged in "the conversation" on an individual level. They are largely confined to the one-to-many schema of the old news flow, where publications speak and readers listen.
The future of news, imho, is chatbots personalized to the user, that bring up the daily news like small talk on a long commute, based on the AI's knowledge of the news consumer. And it'll have through a voice UX just as much as through print.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoThanks for the interesting perspective. While I can see myself enjoying chatterbots telling me news in a casual way, I still wonder - with such focus on "surprise and meaning", where do facts enter the picture? Are we migrating away from factual information towards personalized, opinionated content?
- vonnik 11y agoI think we already migrated. Right now, each story is a bundle of facts and statements. A chatbot could disaggregrate those facts, and feed the news consumer answers to questions they have about the subject without imposing such a total order to the presentation of those facts. That would be the give and take, and the conversation could range far beyond a single piece of news. It's all about contextualizing events. Reporters and editors make a lot of decisions about the context they present, but in this new choose-your-own-adventure format, readers could explore context beyond the limits imposed by a small newshole and all the decisions that entails.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI wonder how this will change the way news and society interact. Right now, news serve as a very important social object - recent events and popular articles provide default topics for conversation for people. If we move to "choose-your-own-adventure format", we may lose the ability to discuss it, as everyone will have their own version of "recent events". BTW. the way you described it - choose-your-own-adventure, seamlessly explorable news - sounds really cool. I'd definitely love to try something like this out.