What will really be the Official News 2.0?
June 14, 2008 – 15:38Blogging was celebrated as the democratization of reporting or publishing but this hasn’t really gone off yet. Instead of opening up traditional news-sites with original stories from local, on the site, reporters with a vast knowledge of the area, the Associated Press (AP) or national equivalents like the dutch ANP hold a firm grip on standardized reporting. As original and less professional sites are becoming more and more popular these traditional organizations are desperately trying to hold that grip on so called official news. AP has noticed take-downs of articles on blogs that quoted bits and pieces of AP’s stories. As this practice clearly falls within the reach of DMCA (part of US copyright law) which allows ‘fair use’ of copyrighted works which includes commenting, reporting or criticizing it. This of course angered the usual suspects: Techdirt and Jeff Jarvis.
What’s happening here has it roots in the marginal costs of reporting since the www came around. Blogging took web-publishing to another level and allowed even the most computer-illiterate people publish their stories. The levee of ´closed source´ news reporting is going to break since crowdsourcing or wikinomics principles acknowledge that in the haystack of a few million bloggers are a few needles that are just as good or even better than official news-sites. These bloggers have all the infrastructure to reach a huge public for a few euros a month.
What I´m wondering is what the first non-official news-site will be that is not a sterilized AP aggregator but rather the result of those needles that emerge from a crowd. Sites like boing boing or Digg just don’t cut it. What will really be the News 2.0?
Sidenote: It came to me that I haven’t even considered newspapers or television to be the media where this will happen, I think that says something.
Update 10th of July 2008: Jeff Jarvis has another thought provoking post on newspapers. His point is that they should make their mind up about what they are: journalist and not a distribution network. Google will take care of the distribution and advertising he thinks. This is quite like what Princeton researches argued about the government publishing their information in XML and RSS format: The government should not be a publisher of information on fancy websites but a generator of information, let someone else take care of the publishing.
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3 Responses to “What will really be the Official News 2.0?”
By Mike Chapman on Jun 14, 2008
Another way to look at it is that it is possible for someone who has something to say, on a fairly regular basis, to develop a significant audience apart from the traditional journalistic sources. While it is possible that a one-blogger might write something so significant that it gets large-scale attention, it is more likely that the audience will be built over time and with much effort. What is no longer required is to get past the editor of a major publication to have that happen.
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Melle
reply on June 15th, 2008 15:32:
Hey Mike, I think that what you said is true. The editor as a filter for news is way easier to get passed. I love the way good blogs tend to get more audience over time by constantly proving themselves. But do you think that there will be one place that is build upon the strength of exactly those bloggers that deliver constant quality AND bloggers that are just lucky to be a the right spot at the right time? The fist type is easy for people to find, especially if know your way around in their niche, but the latter is hard to find. That blogger is really just lucky to find himself at the right spot at the right time and hasn’t build a large audience and will certainly not be the place to check ‘the news’ like one still does at CNN/BBC/Times/etc.
The question is what kind of environment allows these kinds of bloggers to have their (onetime) say on the frontpage while still maintaining the feeling that it is the place for all news.
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By Solovode
on Aug 3, 2008
Thanks for the post
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