Orbiting around us – It’s the future state of journalism
I believe news and the journalism business are going to be re-invented. We have finally reached a state where the business in its current form is dying faster by the day.
There may be many viable business models for the future of journalism. It sure will not be any single model anymore.
But I think news and journalism are going to play out differently than we currently imagine.
Try thinking about each piece of journalism – may it be original reporting, an essay, an opinion piece, investigative reporting, etc – flying around, orbiting around us – the consumers, each and every one of us – like satellites orbiting around the earth, devoid of any attachment.
Each consumer is the future center of gravity around which journalism orbits.
Each piece of news or journalism is going to be formless, if not in two years time then in ten years time. The medium won’t matter any more. The consumer will be able to choose how to consume journalism.
But huge challenges have to be faced along the way.
- The creator of each piece of journalism has to be paid in some form. New models matching creator and consumer and leaving middlemen by the wayside will have to be invented.
- Millions of pieces of journalism will be orbiting around every one of us at any given time. We will be overwhelmed by abundance. Scarcity will be gone for good. But filtering will be fundamentally necessary in order to gain value from a state of abundance. Who will provide it.
- We can’t filter individually, so technology is the best candidate to do it for us. It needs to be up to the task. I need a filter with artificial intelligence: I want to state what I like and vote each filtered piece up or down according to its relevance, from which my filtering mechanism must be able to learn and more adequately match my needs in the future. Hunch, Digg and Hacker News, meet journalism and it’s new master: each consumer on the planet.
- Crowd-sourcing the filtering may work as well. It’s going to be difficult though – true, our tastes are not as unique as we would like to think. Still, someone operating in any specific niche needs different information than others. But vast amounts of crowd-sourced filters are not a bad thing – the cognitive surplus to achieve it is already there: we just have to find ways to channel it for good.
Journalism – truly a land of abundant opportunity.
