Scripting News: How will we get our news? (Scripting News)
Bertil
· 9 months ago
This story makes me think of Argentina's monetary crisis: how can an economy work without cash? Within days, people were so much begging for a way to get a haircut for a loaf of bread (the technical term is: to match non-coöccurring needs) that they set up coöperative certificate that merged and turned into peso-equivalent bills in weeks. When a system is so efficient, needed and embeded in people's psyche, they should be replaced quite fast — and reporting was invented and set up one day. I'm not so worried for good writers keeping a job, but more for objectivity: neutral journals have always been something people aksed for, and have never been able to sustain that for long.
Tom Brandt
· 9 months ago
The Seattle PI has been on the edge for 20 years. Young people (I'm 63) are not used to getting their new from paper. The internet or TV is the norm. The only newspaper I buy these days is the local be-weekly paper. Even though they are linked with the Oregon Live news website, very few of there articles show up there.
I find that the BBC on-line news sources meet my needs and I have several of their feeds on my Bloglines.
Charles
· 9 months ago
While I do enjoy the experience of actually holding a paper (book or magazine) in my hands and turning pages, I will also be honest in admitting that I don't know when the last time I actually read a newpaper was. I don't even watch the daily news broadcasts on television. Not because I have no desire to stay informed, but I don't need them as sources. I stay informed by carefully evaluating the "news" that comes to me through various syndicated feeds and visiting the online versions of print news publishers. I do believe that, for whatever reasons, the print media acknowleged some time ago the need to establish a presence on the web.
The web services and syndicated feeds are where they need to concentrate their efforts. Traditonal print media has become inefficient and not cost effective. They need to abandon their obsessive grip on the past and begin to embrace new channels to distribute their product. As far as subsidizing a failing business model based on inefficient technology with government funded bailouts, don't even think about going there. Such a solution only sets us on the dangerous edge of a slippery slope. I do believe our Consitution recognizes the necessity of a separation between government and our rights to investigate their actions.
Ben Atlas
· 9 months ago
In all of the conversations about the demise of newspapers this question is missing - how did we get the news before the newspapers? It wasn't really that long ago. Give or take 100 years. Newspapers are tools no different from tin cans. And than there is the passion humans have for stories. As long as there are stories to tell there will be some connecting media.
davetong
· 9 months ago
We need journalists. We just don't necessarily need newsprint.
Stephen Michael Kellat
· 9 months ago
Originally put forward at 3:37 PM:
Newspapers, as we know them, are likely not to continue. A merger of Reuters, the AP, and USA Today seems to be the only plausible way forward. They've got the resources to handle distribution as well as the real costs of labor hours in gathering stories.
Newspapers themselves might not die. Local news, though, seems to be disappearing from newspapers more quickly than anything else. We may well get a Print CNN built off of the foundation of USA Today.
I think there's lots of room for some people to make money from their writing, not just because of their writing. I think users of news will pay creators of news. But not for their writing. For the words themselves, there's no price but free, for most writers most of the time.
A select few readers might pay for special access to and interaction with their favorite journalists. That interaction builds trust, and my sense is that trust between journalist and reader is a potentially great place to monetize real-live human benefits above and those contained in just the words. In a post recommended by @jayrosen_nyu, I explain it all here, from the ground up:
Can newspapers support their newsrooms by monetizing their other departments, becoming a marketing agency, writing service, customer service, courier, etc.?
cshotton
· 9 months ago
First and foremost, the newspaper business has to get out of the physical printed media business. Make a device, give it away to subscribers. Let them read the content the papers' dedicated journalists prepare. Include content from a syndicated wire service of quality bloggers. Include video content from the local TV news channels. Merge Craig's List into the classifieds. But do it ALL on a nice, flexible e-paper device that is at least 8.5x11 and color.
Rupert Murdoch seems to get it. He's looking for exactly this way out. He might even have the capital to push the creation of such a device and ram-rod it into his content creation businesses. But you can bet your bottom dollar that all the bloggers in the world would never be able to pull off a paradigm shift like that. They don't have the political or financial capital to pull it off. So either the existing media companies figure it out or we enter into a new era where the only news comes from CNN and Fox.
interstar
· 9 months ago
Maybe a site *only* for "scoops", ie. breaking news stories which haven't been seen anywhere else online.
You have some Digg-style voting. Then, after giving readers 24 hours to challenge the *originality* of the story (by finding earlier references), the highest voted (most important, sorta) story of the day wins a cash-prize. If someone finds it elsewhere online, then you don't give the prize. (But you do give something to the guy who found out it wasn't original.)
Basically you do the opposite of Wikipedia's "no original research" policy. You ruthlessly reward "scoopness".
Pay for the prize by charging subscribers a few dollars for a feed which has the stories an hour earlier than they appear on the site. For real news junkies, an hour early may be worth a subscription of 10 dollars a month. (A hundred thousand subscribers gives you a million dollars a month from which you get your prize-money and your costs.)
Sell further analysis services around that feed. Could be automatically generated statistics, could be expert opinion, could be classification, could be ad-supported blog commentary, could be print-on-demand hard copy.
Bertil
· 9 months ago
Your idea both sounds great, and has the bitter taste of "15 Minutes" (that film about a maffia boss that went on a shooting spree to sell the tape and plead insanity?) — However, how are you going to have people investigate the claims (truthfulness)? The prize to prove wrong the winning story would have to be higher then the daily one, otherwise you'd have blackmail; symetrically, it has to be much lower, otherwise, some individuals might find interresting to suggest the most sensationalist story every day, to eventually disprove it. In other worlds: you mind end up with self-reported face-slashing sprees, Britney's upskirts, fanboy wars and a very concentrated high-fructose meme syrup.
Briefly, yeah, false stories are a problem. I don't think we have to eliminate them entirely (the ordinary press can't either) but we need to disincentivate them. My guess is that some stories will be proven pretty much self-evidently false within a fairly short time (24 hours, 48 hours) and these can lose their prize money.
The other thing we can do is "punish" those who consistently submit stories that are found to be false - perhaps delaying their stories or relegating them to the end of a list. Similarly, if a voter has a habit of voting up false stories, we can devalue his or her votes too. This isn't perfect. Sometimes bad stories will get through, get voted up, win prize money and influence the nation. But then sometimes lying newspapers make a lot of money selling false stories too.
You're right that collaboration between story submitters and their "critics" might bring the system down. We might need to find other mechanisms. Also, I'm not thinking of this as a monolithic system. There could be many sites like this (just as there are many newspapers) in competition for readers and fact-checking each other.
peteraxon
· 9 months ago
The problem is we need some way to motivate good, truthful story telling without leaving it open to abuse. The thing we are always going to be fighting however is basic human greed. People have such a mindset that many of them will do nothing for free and anything for enough money.
We need to bring out, motivate and reward the community minded people who will do something because it is a good thing to do and do it well because they are proud of their work.
sbisson
· 9 months ago
The problem isn't one of newspapers dying - it's one of too many local papers and no real national paper. The newspaper is doing just fine elsewhere in the world.
ickledot
· 9 months ago
Not here in the UK. Local papers particularly are shadows of their former selves. Right now, reporters at the Yorkshire Post, close to where I live, are taking industrial action over salaries and job cuts (http://is.gd/ly7e). For me, if newspapers go under the problem is felt most severely at local level. Also, we are in danger of creating news and comment ghettos for those who do not have access to the net - many such people still exist. For them, reading rather than watching the news would be a thing of the past.
Michael Becker
· 9 months ago
I don't understand your reasoning here. Local papers are what we need most, more than national papers. It's the local news that sheds light on things that are happening and wrong in our communities. National papers don't have the resources to do that at a local level.
I'd rather live in a world with local papers and no national papers than in one that only had national papers.
kidmercury
· 9 months ago
the answers are simple and there are already people doing it.
professional bloggers. talk radio. independent vidographers/documentary filmmakers. niche social networks, i.e. all the stuff you talk about doing with scripting.com -- i.e. social voting, niche twitter -- that is the future of information discovery.
people are still doing CPC/CPM advertising, though that will increasingly be unsatisfactory in terms of revenue generation. what is disruptive is in popular voices (that's you dave) using their niche social network to recommnend products/services -- i.e. build a brand and monetize their influence.
the much larger crisis is that even in such an environment people need the courage to tell the truth. intellect is easy and vastly overrated. integrity is the scarcity. but as this crisis deepens, people will realize the importance of respecting the Truth -- and that everything else is meaningless until this is understood.
9/11 was an inside job, kid mercury
Rayne1
· 9 months ago
You're absolutely right, people are already providing journalism, including excellent investigative work we haven't seen in quantity from mainstream media.
The question is not whether journalism is dead or dying; we should not mistake publication processes for journalism. The question is business model: how do we support journalism now that it's leaving an old and dying print-based, advertising-supported business model?
In no small way this is a return to the the basics, the roots of American journalism. How did Ben Franklin's peers earn their keep, once they had their own presses?
Twitter was one of the first cases -- but before twitter, there was, e.g. News.COM (CBS sho wuz smaat 2 listen.me.uk -- u kno? ;)
ROFL....
;D nmw
Michael Fraase
· 9 months ago
Yelvington pointed out the other day that the cost of a netbook and year of internet is now less than most newspaper subscriptions.
I'm hoping Joel Kramer at MinnPost.com can wean his operation off foundation money and arrive at a sustainable model.
Yule Heibel
· 9 months ago
Interesting comment (reported in CEOs for Cities blog) by Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibarguen, who suggests "that newspapers that aren't profitable should be converted to nonprofit status and owned by the community."
Which throws up a huge question around democracy - and that happens to be the starting point of CEOs for Cities' post ("Matching Democracy to Media Reach").
"...there is, for the first time, a disconnect between media reach and where democracy happens. While local newspapers and radio are disppearing [sic], online media is worldwide..." One question Ibarguen asks is, "How do you structure democracy in a virtual way that is not rooted to geography?" which is (imo) interesting, but also kind of weird and abstract. CEOs for Cities counters that we need face-to-face and the local component.
dinogane
· 9 months ago
There was a time when people needed to hunt down their own animals in order to get a good meal. Sales of spears must have been sky high then. Just because we no longer need spears does not mean we no longer eat. The spears have been exchanged for farms and other entirely different ways of producing food.
My view is that the traditional newspapers are dying, but that they are being replaced by different kinds of newspapers - such as company newsletters / blogs, newsletters selling things and free newspapers. I've recently posted on my own blog about this. http://www.managingmagic.com/2009/02/new-newspa...
George Vogt
· 9 months ago
Why should I subscribe to a paper newspaper (a Hearst outlet in a major city) to get reprints of wire stories when I can go to reuters.com and mcclatchydc.com and get them directly from the source? Why should I subscribe to paper to get Tom Friedman's and George Will's columns 3 days late when I can go to nytimes.com and get them the same day they're first published, or iht.com and get them 6 hours earlier in European timezones? No reason at all.
Newspapers exist only for local news and local sports. They provide box scores better than TV news can ever possibly do.
All Comments
I find that the BBC on-line news sources meet my needs and I have several of their feeds on my Bloglines.
The web services and syndicated feeds are where they need to concentrate their efforts. Traditonal print media has become inefficient and not cost effective. They need to abandon their obsessive grip on the past and begin to embrace new channels to distribute their product. As far as subsidizing a failing business model based on inefficient technology with government funded bailouts, don't even think about going there. Such a solution only sets us on the dangerous edge of a slippery slope. I do believe our Consitution recognizes the necessity of a separation between government and our rights to investigate their actions.
Newspapers, as we know them, are likely not to continue. A merger of Reuters, the AP, and USA Today seems to be the only plausible way forward. They've got the resources to handle distribution as well as the real costs of labor hours in gathering stories.
Newspapers themselves might not die. Local news, though, seems to be disappearing from newspapers more quickly than anything else. We may well get a Print CNN built off of the foundation of USA Today.
Update at 5:44 PM:
I just stumbled across this and am curious what Dave may think of it: http://denver.yourhub.com/Parker/Stories/Sound-...
A select few readers might pay for special access to and interaction with their favorite journalists. That interaction builds trust, and my sense is that trust between journalist and reader is a potentially great place to monetize real-live human benefits above and those contained in just the words. In a post recommended by @jayrosen_nyu, I explain it all here, from the ground up:
http://networkednews.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/n...
Rupert Murdoch seems to get it. He's looking for exactly this way out. He might even have the capital to push the creation of such a device and ram-rod it into his content creation businesses. But you can bet your bottom dollar that all the bloggers in the world would never be able to pull off a paradigm shift like that. They don't have the political or financial capital to pull it off. So either the existing media companies figure it out or we enter into a new era where the only news comes from CNN and Fox.
You have some Digg-style voting. Then, after giving readers 24 hours to challenge the *originality* of the story (by finding earlier references), the highest voted (most important, sorta) story of the day wins a cash-prize. If someone finds it elsewhere online, then you don't give the prize. (But you do give something to the guy who found out it wasn't original.)
Basically you do the opposite of Wikipedia's "no original research" policy. You ruthlessly reward "scoopness".
Pay for the prize by charging subscribers a few dollars for a feed which has the stories an hour earlier than they appear on the site. For real news junkies, an hour early may be worth a subscription of 10 dollars a month. (A hundred thousand subscribers gives you a million dollars a month from which you get your prize-money and your costs.)
Sell further analysis services around that feed. Could be automatically generated statistics, could be expert opinion, could be classification, could be ad-supported blog commentary, could be print-on-demand hard copy.
thanks for the comment. I'm brainstorming more about this here : http://blahsploitation.blogspot.com/2009/03/aft...
Briefly, yeah, false stories are a problem. I don't think we have to eliminate them entirely (the ordinary press can't either) but we need to disincentivate them. My guess is that some stories will be proven pretty much self-evidently false within a fairly short time (24 hours, 48 hours) and these can lose their prize money.
The other thing we can do is "punish" those who consistently submit stories that are found to be false - perhaps delaying their stories or relegating them to the end of a list. Similarly, if a voter has a habit of voting up false stories, we can devalue his or her votes too. This isn't perfect. Sometimes bad stories will get through, get voted up, win prize money and influence the nation. But then sometimes lying newspapers make a lot of money selling false stories too.
You're right that collaboration between story submitters and their "critics" might bring the system down. We might need to find other mechanisms. Also, I'm not thinking of this as a monolithic system. There could be many sites like this (just as there are many newspapers) in competition for readers and fact-checking each other.
We need to bring out, motivate and reward the community minded people who will do something because it is a good thing to do and do it well because they are proud of their work.
I'd rather live in a world with local papers and no national papers than in one that only had national papers.
professional bloggers. talk radio. independent vidographers/documentary filmmakers. niche social networks, i.e. all the stuff you talk about doing with scripting.com -- i.e. social voting, niche twitter -- that is the future of information discovery.
people are still doing CPC/CPM advertising, though that will increasingly be unsatisfactory in terms of revenue generation. what is disruptive is in popular voices (that's you dave) using their niche social network to recommnend products/services -- i.e. build a brand and monetize their influence.
the much larger crisis is that even in such an environment people need the courage to tell the truth. intellect is easy and vastly overrated. integrity is the scarcity. but as this crisis deepens, people will realize the importance of respecting the Truth -- and that everything else is meaningless until this is understood.
9/11 was an inside job,
kid mercury
The question is not whether journalism is dead or dying; we should not mistake publication processes for journalism. The question is business model: how do we support journalism now that it's leaving an old and dying print-based, advertising-supported business model?
In no small way this is a return to the the basics, the roots of American journalism. How did Ben Franklin's peers earn their keep, once they had their own presses?
Twitter was one of the first cases -- but before twitter, there was, e.g. News.COM (CBS sho wuz smaat 2 listen.me.uk -- u kno? ;)
ROFL....
;D nmw
I'm hoping Joel Kramer at MinnPost.com can wean his operation off foundation money and arrive at a sustainable model.
Which throws up a huge question around democracy - and that happens to be the starting point of CEOs for Cities' post ("Matching Democracy to Media Reach").
See http://www.ceosforcities.org/blog/entry/2163 :
"...there is, for the first time, a disconnect between media reach and where democracy happens. While local newspapers and radio are disppearing [sic], online media is worldwide..." One question Ibarguen asks is, "How do you structure democracy in a virtual way that is not rooted to geography?" which is (imo) interesting, but also kind of weird and abstract. CEOs for Cities counters that we need face-to-face and the local component.
My view is that the traditional newspapers are dying, but that they are being replaced by different kinds of newspapers - such as company newsletters / blogs, newsletters selling things and free newspapers. I've recently posted on my own blog about this. http://www.managingmagic.com/2009/02/new-newspa...
Newspapers exist only for local news and local sports. They provide box scores better than TV news can ever possibly do.