News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the web. So called "blogs" (because the old media call everything published online a "blog") like PerezHilton and TechCrunch are one sign of the future. News sites like Reddit and Digg are another. But these are just the beginning.
I'll make the bold claim that we haven't yet seen this "morph" in media. The blog concept is now staid yet Buzzfeed is the most innovative publisher we have. And they are just re-branding the advertorial as "native advertising."
The only changes I've seen lately are larger and more diverse media to accompany text. Not a substantially new product as far as I can tell.
The morph happened, but it's got nothing to do with media format. It has to do with source and accuracy.
The big change is that we don't get our science from OMNI, our glimpses of new cars from popular mechanics or our poll forecasting from CNN. We get specific stories from subject matter experts who can communicate without oversimplifying into nonsense and who have a true need to deliver truth above advertising or team-affiliation concerns.
(As if they deliver nonsense, or are transparently-in-the-bag for a monied interest, they'll be quickly sidelined and ignored.)
I haven't seen the last part. Many popular blogs are delivering nonsense and not being sidelined. The blog-news industry is full of poorly researched speculation sourced mainly from Twitter and Wikipedia (not always with attribution), reblogged images from Reddit, sensationalized summaries of university press releases, top-10 lists, etc., etc.
"Buzzfeed is the most innovative publisher we have"
Strong disagree. I am not sure I would call the New Yorker the most innovative and yet buzzfeed has nothing comparable to strongbox[1]. Vice? Quartz? Medium?
Its possible that I am letting my opinion of Buzzfeed's "content" cloud my judgement of their innovation. What do you think BF is doing that is innovative?
I see Buzzfeed's innovation as largely around the continued development of the "Contributor Model" for content, which drives down the per-unit cost of content by turning to non-fulltime outsiders to help create content along side full-time staffers. Medium taps into this, as did Quora before it.
Vice is pretty innovative around web content but no new formats that I know of and a typical "stringer" model with high editorial touch. Quartz is visually different (super slick JS based webapp) but the underlying news is the same that you get elsewhere.
This is something I've been thinking about recently. If you boil down the 'news problem,' the dominant solutions are traditional news channels (TV networks, newspapers) and sites like Reddit and Digg. I would categorize bloggers as very small-scale traditional news sources, and RSS feeds as a way to combine these traditional and nontraditional sources.
The strength of traditional news is partly cultural, but also due to the nature of its content as being curated and vetted by some (hopefully) informed party prior to publication. Whatever is there, can very generally be expected to be of a higher quality than any random given 'social news' post on the same subject. The drawback, of course, is that the only news available is that which the source determines is 'newsworthy,' which is a very subjective and questionable standard.
Conversely, the strength of 'social news' sources such as Reddit is in their inherent chaos. The crowd decides what floats to the top, with no real vetting process or curation except within the most strictly moderated subcommunities. This ensures that the most socially relevant topics get 'published' to the front page and into the public eye, but those stories have little to no quality control. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of the "Eternal September," there has been an established trend wherein as the size of a loosely controlled network grows, the quality and content increasingly caters to the lowest common denominator, driving the more invested (and usually the more intellectual) users out, and eroding the value of the network. This has been seen over and over on Reddit, as the mainstream subreddits get overrun with a colossal stream of new users, and any niche interests get sidelined and marginalized.
I would propose a hybrid approach. Why not create a news source - whatever category you decide to label it - that publishes content that is vetted for quality (bias, sensationalism, thoroughness, etc.) but not subject area; in other words, where the articles are all good, and any subject is fair game? Layered on this could be some categorized and 'social' voting algorithm, much like Reddit with subreddits, and users could subscribe to those channels which they cared most strongly for, thereby creating their own high quality news source.
This is just a thought I had today. It's obviously not fully baked yet. What do you think?
An idea I've been interested in seeing is a regional paywall for online media. Instead of doing it for a single site like the NY Times (who is uniquely positioned to do that), regional newspapers and TV stations could band together and have a shared paywall. The big challenge would be figuring out the revenue share.
I'll make the bold claim that we haven't yet seen this "morph" in media. The blog concept is now staid yet Buzzfeed is the most innovative publisher we have. And they are just re-branding the advertorial as "native advertising."
The only changes I've seen lately are larger and more diverse media to accompany text. Not a substantially new product as far as I can tell.