Bob LeDrew of FlackLife makes some interesting observations on the state of traditional news media in his riff on this “growing media tree” post from Mike’s Points. (“Growing media tree” is Mike’s collective term to describe the blogosphere and other sundry social networks that, by virtue of the Internet’s interconnectedness, have grafted themselves into the traditional news media sphere.) Both bloggers join in the hand-wringing about the fate of traditional journalism in the new mediasphere and the mainstream media’s seeming inability to find a viable economic model in this online arena. Mike lists all sorts of questions for the blogosphere to address, while Bob homes in on Mike’s first point:
Why can’t traditional media — print media — find out how to make more money from the valuable services they provide?
That’s the point upon which the rest of the questions hinge. If the media can’t make money, then they can’t afford to operate. Here’s Bob’s response:
They are trying, but they’re being faced with challenges they haven’t seen before. I think that the nimbleness of the blogosphere, what Ian Ketcheson calls the “self-organizing” nature, is allowing people to get so much information so quickly that ‘old media’ are missing out on not only the old revenue models, but that they’re missing NEW revenue models.
I happened to re-read a mid-90s book called The next 20 years of your life this week. The author, futurist Richard Worzel, has lots of interesting thoughts, even if they’re nine years old. And while some of what he envisions has either not come to pass or is going to take a lot longer to happen than his ‘event horizon’ of 2017, I think one of his more intriguing ideas was one of “news agents.” The idea essentially is that in the future, you would have a “genie” that would create an individually tailored “newscast” that would also be able to call up more depth on any story that caught your eye, from magazine coverage to online chats to opening up one-on-one dialogues, all of which would cost in the cents rather than the dollars that an Infomart or similar search would cost you now.
We have those news agents now. They’re called RSS feeds. But we still have to program those agents.
Andy writes! 