People often fail to realise the connection between their political or social views and the media sources they prefer. How one’s beliefs are formed is a bit of a chicken and egg problem when it comes to media sources – which came first, being right-wing or watching Fox News?

But I maintain that if you care (personally or professionally) about getting to the bottom of issues, you will have to select the best possible information sources, amongst them primary sources.

First, you have to face a basic problem: our current media landscape is not helping you staying informed. The New York Times has no real interest in reporting the objective truth. They have an interest in selling their product as often as possible, which means maintaining an effective illusion of reporting the truth for as big of a market of potential readers as possible.

You may think people care about the truth. Don’t be mistaken. Look at which newspapers have the highest circulation numbers: mostly those who have effectively locked down a geographical market or serve a general world-view. And that’s for people who even buy newspapers, who are probably more interested in informing themselves (or at least upholding the appearance of doing so) than the mean.

So when reading newspapers often makes you rather misinformed, what is one to do in order to truly learn about issues one cares about?

Select the issues you truly care about and read primary sources!

You cannot reasonably be well-informed about a lot of issues so you have to select those you truly care about – there is only so much time in a day.

For those issues you do truly care about, Clay Johnson has helpful hints to give. He is the author of a new book, “The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption”, in which he makes an excellent point on the importance of reading primary sources:

“All too often, we consume information at the top of the trophic pyramid of truth, and as such, we’re getting only the information that has been selected for us by a network of operators interested not in telling us the truth, but in giving us what sells. (…)

We have to move towards the base of the pyramid if we want to see what’s really going on.”

Let’s focus on a concrete example of what reading primary sources will yield in terms of insights: the recent Wikileaks publication of internal StratFor (Strategic Forecasting) emails.

If you had read every news piece the mass media published about these emails during the first 24 hours of their publication, you would have come away with a lot of misconceived ideas and story-lines about what StratFor is and is not (‘do they sexually exploit their sources?!’) and what information they are privy to.

If you had spent about 2-3 hours reading the actual first 230 published emails, you would have gained very interesting, if a bit superfluous, insights into how an intelligence organization like StratFor actually works (which is similar to how the CIA etc works) and what regional issues they care about. Their analytical guidance e.g. for Germany from 2009 lists Neo-nazi, radical right wing and anti-immigrant violence as the ‘main internal threats to Germany’, which has proven to be very well-founded during 2011.

You would also have learned e.g. the following information, which was mostly not reported in most media reports about the leaks:
- Israel may have already succeeded in destroying most of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure
- Mossad may have contracted out the Dubai murders and the Iranian physicist hit
- Chavez’ cancer may have spread to the lymph nodes and into the bone marrow already and there may be all kinds of shady background deals going on as to becomes the successor
- US Democrats may have committed election fraud during the Presidential election of 2008 in Philadelphia and Ohio
- “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy may have been orchestrated from the very beginning and the Imam may have been an operational asset of the FBI
- Karl Rove may have a close personal/working relationship to Kerry Cammack, whose wife happens to have been elected to the Texas Supreme Court
- Osama bin Laden’s body may have been flown to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda for examinations etc before allegedly being buried in the sea
- French businesses may pay some of the highest bribes in the military procurement business
- Estimates of drug profits from Mexican sources may be wrong to the order of tens of billions of USD
- Turkey may want to lead the Islamic world
- Several mid to senior level Pakistani Intelligence service and military personnel (including a retired General) may have known about Osama Bin Laden’s safe house arrangements; the United States may know which ones
- Russian Prosecutor General / Attorney General may have been a source for StratFor; there may be a lot of specific criminal activity going on in all kinds of Russian institutions
- 1 of 19 Pakistani brigadiers recently promoted to major generals may be a StratFor source
- German Bundeswehr may have failed dramatically in their stabilisation efforts in Afghanistan due to not understanding counterinsurgency operations

All this may or may not be true – given the nature of the leaked emails – but at least you can read the primary sources for yourself and make up your mind about them (insofar as one considers the emails the primary sources in this case and not the StratFor sources/analysts themselves). Journalists instead are often bound by internal guidelines and will not report about certain information at all or may just be under too much time pressure to spend a few hours reading and evaluating. Not to even mention that most journalists don’t really know their covered topics that well – they are just not incentivized to truly know or to care.

Also, these primary sources and the information contained within may or may not surprise the most hardened analysts whose very job it is to stay informed about these topics. Which is a point that is often mentioned in relation to Wikileaks publications – how “there is nothing new” in the leaks. But there is a lot of new information for the general public and most probably for you and me. At least, most, if not all, of this information surely didn’t become public knowledge beforehand.

So if you care about an issue, do not outsource your information gathering. Read primary sources. You will learn a lot and become less misinformed in the process.

• Find sources you trust (the most) and consciously account for their biases – a glaringly obvious example: don’t read Krugman in the New York Times and think he doesn’t have a worldview to sell. Differentiate between reporting mostly facts (e.g. Bloomberg) vs. ‘news’ as (political) entertainment (e.g. Krugman, also nearly every daily paper). Place emphasis on sources that often openly declare their views if relevant (e.g. The Economist).
• Don’t buy into explanations of why things happened; reporters have mostly no clue either, it’s often just conjecture - just try to absorb the facts and try to make up your own mind (have you ever read ‘explanations’ of why flash crashs happened? It’s hilarious).
• Read a huge variety of sources, so that biases tend to cancel each other out – especially on politically charged topics, you need to get different viewpoints (e.g. read The New Yorker and The Weekly Standard).
• Make use of modern media – there is excellent reporting out there, you just have to find it (e.g. Felix Salmon for financial markets and business reporting), also use aggregators (e.g. Hacker News, Abnormal Returns; Long Form; Metafilter etc.), also read out-of-mainstream sources (the little crazy ones, e.g. Zero Hedge).
• Try an information diet as recommended by Rolf Dobelli or Nicholas Nassim Taleb, find out why it doesn’t work for you, but still improve your reading habits.

I am deeply interested in the future of journalism. I think one aspect of Y Combinator’s take on this is spot-on:

What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money—as print media once did—instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?

I think the best way to make money is to tailor the content individually to each user. News and journalism (i.e. essays, op-eds, original reporting etc.) are abundant. But why should you care what the New York Times thinks is relevant about what’s going on in the world? You may be interested in a lot of different topics or you may be very deeply interested in a single topic.

One-for-all just doesn’t cut it anymore. People crave personalized experiences.

Ever more people need to stay on top of what’s happening in the world or in business. But with a growing amount of news, it gets more difficult and more time-consuming to do so. I think people will pay to have an accurate filtering mechanism pre-determine what they need to consume.

To shorten the amount of time they need to get and consume (eventually) all the relevant information they need, they will pay. It frees considerable time otherwise spent browsing websites or paper editions of the world’s newspapers and magazines.

The end result is a daily executive summary of the world’s news and information, compiled and provided individually for each user. It is tailor-made, medium-independent personal content, presented as an individualized summary with links to all relevant content. That’s enough buzzwords for now.

There are two takes on this I thought of:

1. The “easy” one, or the premium market: GetAbstract for news. Users can subscribe to summaries of any number of newspapers and magazines they want. They get spared the time needed to browse and read the content themselves and instead are provided with an abstract / a summary of the major articles. Users can choose from different options, i.e. different topics may get special coverage or more or less depth of the summaries. There are legal and scaling problems with this idea and it’s not very ground-breaking, but I think there is enough value for it to sell. Obviously, this only makes sense for users who value their time financially high enough to warrant paying for such a service.

2. The “futuristic” one, or the mass market: A daily summary of the world’s news, fully automated – like your personal reading assistant. It’s a combination of several mechanisms which, individually, have proven to work but which, each on their own, are very very hard to get right: (1) Amazon-like recommendations (liked that article about Nancy Pelosi? What about reading on Harry Reid?); (2) delicious-like content recommendations by your friends or social circle, this may include a voting mechanism to not miss what’s popular right now; (3) content selection based on data (keyword) analysis of what you previously liked; (4) content selection based on categories / keywords you provided. All of this should you compiled into a single summary for each user with links to all relevant content. I am no coder, so this is just a conceptual idea with no clue on technical feasibility. It’s just something that I think would be totally awesome to have. Because I read religiously, and I would love to have something like that. I might even pay a little bit for it.

That’s it. Here is the preliminary descriptorum.com. Thanks for reading and please feel free to comment, mail me or further journalism on your own!

I think it’s just a totally different argument to make – at least in these spheres, where I think you have to differentiate between concept and adoption. Either you critique the original idea or you argue that its adoption is flawed. But to combine those two arguments just makes your critique seem lazy and to be a foregone conclusion.

Judging ideas on their merit is, of course, much more difficult as you need to be intimately aware of their context and of the creator’s intentions. This requirement for deep understanding not only makes it harder to argue your point, but also exposes your incapability in case you go ahead nonetheless.

Apparently though, it’s much easier to get published by mainstream publications if you just make shallow and sloppy arguments which sound good and go nicely with pre-existing world views.

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.

Eight months later, a report to the UN about Hariri’s assassination outlined a plot of astonishing complexity: a mysteriously reduced security detail, remarkably detailed intelligence on his movements and the moving of the truck into position just one minute and 49 seconds prior to the convoy passing by – all of this bore the hallmarks of a government-sponsored assassination. It implicated if not Syrian President Bashar Assad directly, then at least his inner circle.

The violent death of a charismatic figure created a huge hole in Lebanese politics – just at the time when there was a rising backlash in the country against Syrian influence in the region and its own territory.

There has been an endless meddling with investigations by the UN – its International Independent Investigation Commission is a farce and most probably a disguise for a politically-agreed “blame scenario” to settle the issue and to further Syria’s standing in the peace process.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise though, that there seems to be a “breakthrough” in tribunal investigations as new evidence – obtained by Der Spiegel, a German magazine – seems to point to Hezbollah as being behind the Hariri murder.

This quite obviously reeks of a political cover-up by the UN commission.

An intact Syrian leadership may be needed to further the Middle East peace process – so it may be deemed inappropriate to implicate it in a murder of such prominence.

Whatever the reasons behind “new” evidence being discovered and dispersed among the press, it sure is surprising that Hezbollah is coming up as the villain for the first time ever.

Then why are obvious questions not being asked? Why are journalists contend to write about a “breakthrough“, when it just reeks of a cover-up and the explanation for Hezbollah’s involvement is far-fetched?

The UN has failed time and time again – just think of the Oil-for-Food Programme, Kofi Annan’s questionable role in it etc – to provide truthful statements about areas of conflict and dispute and has confined itself to obscuring the truth and giving in to political meddling in too many instances.

If someone gets payed, as journalists do, to ask at least the obvious questions and to go beyond face-value and to report about the conclusions they draw, and by all means fails in that respect, then I am not willing to pay money – and more importantly respect – for that kind of journalism anymore.

Consider me utterly unconvinced, dear Spiegel, of your reporting standards.

If a murdered Prime Minister doesn’t seem to call for your highest standards of diligence in reporting, then what does?

There have been a lot of missives recently, discussing the possible reasons for the decline of newspapers. Although I do think newspapers have to share some blame for their too often faulty and misleading reporting, there seem to be a lot of factors at work. The time may just be ripe for some disruption of the business.

Which is why I gave business opportunities in this apparant moment of industry disruption some thought. I may as well share it with you. After having read a lot about the future of news and journalism, I am no doomsayer. I believe societies need people or mechanisms for getting important thoughts some outreach; and I believe societies will find ways to accomplish that. It may just not be the newspapers’ obligation anymore as they have failed “us” too often (while also providing splendid work on occasion).

Which niche would I expand into if I were to open up a news/journalism business right now?

Where are the opportunities?

1. Hyperlocal news supported by hyperlocal advertising: Knowing the latest developments from your original neighbourhood provide you with immediate value. You know what’s happening, where to go, etc. And this is one of the very moments where you are actively open to advertisement: You even want to know which local shop has some sales going on, where you can find the cheapest xy etc. This model provides obvious value to its users. There are several problems: Local shops may not know about the internet yet. You have to have some sales force convincing mom-and-pop stores to advertise at your site. Your margins may therefore be very low, if you can get this done profitably at all. The model doesn’t scale that well as the sales force is probably needed everywhere; you have to have people for quality checks who know the neighbourhood etc. High cost basis, unknown revenue potential. This is an aggregator business, so you have to be good at it technically. You need good filtering, need to know what kind of local news are wanted. Last but not leas: it’s already being done. But fear not, there are a lot of neighbourhoods in the world.. 
2. Paper-on-demand: People define what they are interested in, you provide a customized online paper to them. Sounds easy in theory, but is very hard to actually accomplish. First, online readability: no one has yet solved the problem that reading on a screen just doesn’t enable you to scan as many headlines and articles as with an actual newspaper. Bigger screens probably are only part of a solution; getting closer to Google Reader designwise (lots of scrolling through news then) could enhance efficiency. The second issue is a technical one: Your system has to be really good at automatically tagging stories into their appropriate categories. This model all depends on getting the customization right. Customers may not even know what they want and may not be satisfied with your selection. Human filtering and tagging is probably too expensive at first, but may be feasible as soon as the model scales. And getting to know your customer (so that you can present him with those stories he will definitely be interested in) will take time.. time in which he probably will not pay yet as your service remains mediocre at best.
3. Marketplace for topic-on-demand: This may be one of the more experimental ideas. As journalists get fired, some will probably set themselves up as writers-for-hire. And some people or organisations may be willing to pay someone to research or investigate their topics. If this ever scales, there might be an opportunity in being the middleman.
4. Citizen journalism, supported by professionals (pro-am journalism?): The OffTheBus initiative (lots of volunteer reports coordinated by a few professionals) worked wonderfully when there is an event of such enourmous importance as the US Election ’08. There are a lot of people out there who would just love to feel important by contributing their view of any topic. If you can find a way to successfully engage enough of them on a regular basis for free, you might be able to pay for the staff required to edit their on-the-ground reporting and even establish a community around it. The path to monetization remains unclear though; you could argue a case to combine this with a hyperlocal portal, so people could report about their local community (and others could read about it) which would intensify their usage of the site (which means hyperlocal advertising might earn you some money).

Where I definitely would not want to wander into:

1. Micropayments. There are two issues at work here, I suppose. First of all, micropayments have not been solved as of yet. iTunes works, sure. But I don’t know of any website – anything really which does not use proprietary software – which has solved the problems and hassles of micropayments: How to get people to shell out .99 $ or € for something of dubious value? How to safely process the payment in the least intrusive way? Someone would need to invent much better ways of paying across a variety of websites – in other words: one-click-charging all over the web, how to do that securely? Secondly, news analysis and even original reporting are not scarce. It’s inherently difficult to imagine a way in which journalism can be marketed so that people are willing to pay .99 or even more for a single piece of it, when they could just as well surf elsewhere and probably get comparable quality. 
2. Paywalls are most probably dead (on arrival, depending on whether they will be tinkered with again). It just doesn’t fit with the internet as an open-source/free/etc. medium. Scarcity of news analysis or reporting just ain’t gonna happen. People will go elsewhere. The only possible way I see for this is to target highly specialized niche audiences whom you can provide value to by accurate, fast and well-done journalism (e.g. finance professionals, obviously, i.e. people who can use your journalism to further their goals, not just to inform themselves).

As you see, some niche might just work and spit out some profitable businesses. And fear not for the future of quality journalism. As quality content is considered, it has always found a way to get published and that will not change by way of the internet – which is just a different medium for providing you with information.