The Future of News
By Nigel Middlemiss, Knowledge Director, Echo Research
The future of news is up for debate. Nobody really knows what will happen to newspapers as online storms ahead
Some say “the economics of free” – giveaways like the Metro, free websites like the Guardian - is causing carnage among UK journalists, with 2,000 lost through dwindling circulation and title closures in the last year. There are fears that journalism will become a hyphenated profession; because there is not enough money in newspapers alone, journalist-lawyers and journalist-lecturers etc will be the only ones to make ends meet.
Others say the evidence tends the opposite way: people will always pay for great content. A million subscribers pay for the Wall Street Journal online, and four million for The Economist. Paid-for TV like Sky is growing while free-to-air TV is in decline. Some newspapers are only failing because, in the US certainly, they were lazy big town monopolies.
What is sure is that the channels or carriers of news are on the move; 26 new e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle are coming to market this year and they will overtake, some predictions say, iPads and laptops as convenient readers, and replace the physical bulk, transportation demands and chemical damage of newspapers.
Clearly there’s no going back on Web 2.0 and its news successes. There are now heavily trafficked sites that take the best of freelance contributions from around the globe to create a newswire service. Patch.com in the US is a typical platform for people to tell stories citizen-to-citizen, unfettered and free, and so is wikileaks.com which aggregates leaks that “the Establishment” don’t want you to know about. Blogs influence geo-politics as they issue pleas to the world from inside repressive regimes like Iran. There are Egyptian bloggers who collect allegations of torture and challenge their Government with it, for example.
Perhaps the most convincing take on who will win the blog vs. news media debate is: nobody will. Certainly social media give us more access to unmediated news. But nobody ever knows where the journey will end; almost everyone gets it wrong. Some said when the car was invented that the train would end, when traffic started to gridlock that flying cars would be invented to overcome congestion.
But news values will survive transmission changes, as they have in transit through ink and paper to film, to TV, to computers. The medium is not really key; the message is. What matters is what’s happening in the world; that is what people want to be sure has been reliably aggregated and is being powerfully presented through sharp writing, great pictures, clever graphics, wide coverage. You have to trust the output: and for that you need an editor, a fact-checker, an accountable individual, which means trained journalists. The demand side not the supply side will determine news. Publishing, in whatever form, will remain.
As to the “economics of free”, Rupert Murdoch has now declared war on aggregators like Google. This month he started putting News International coverage behind a ‘paywall’. Will his general interest papers be able to mimic the model of financial journalism like the FT, Economist, WSJ? Watch this space.
The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.
The future of news is up for debate. Nobody really knows what will happen to newspapers as online storms ahead
Some say “the economics of free” – giveaways like the Metro, free websites like the Guardian - is causing carnage among UK journalists, with 2,000 lost through dwindling circulation and title closures in the last year. There are fears that journalism will become a hyphenated profession; because there is not enough money in newspapers alone, journalist-lawyers and journalist-lecturers etc will be the only ones to make ends meet.
Others say the evidence tends the opposite way: people will always pay for great content. A million subscribers pay for the Wall Street Journal online, and four million for The Economist. Paid-for TV like Sky is growing while free-to-air TV is in decline. Some newspapers are only failing because, in the US certainly, they were lazy big town monopolies.
What is sure is that the channels or carriers of news are on the move; 26 new e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle are coming to market this year and they will overtake, some predictions say, iPads and laptops as convenient readers, and replace the physical bulk, transportation demands and chemical damage of newspapers.
Clearly there’s no going back on Web 2.0 and its news successes. There are now heavily trafficked sites that take the best of freelance contributions from around the globe to create a newswire service. Patch.com in the US is a typical platform for people to tell stories citizen-to-citizen, unfettered and free, and so is wikileaks.com which aggregates leaks that “the Establishment” don’t want you to know about. Blogs influence geo-politics as they issue pleas to the world from inside repressive regimes like Iran. There are Egyptian bloggers who collect allegations of torture and challenge their Government with it, for example.
Perhaps the most convincing take on who will win the blog vs. news media debate is: nobody will. Certainly social media give us more access to unmediated news. But nobody ever knows where the journey will end; almost everyone gets it wrong. Some said when the car was invented that the train would end, when traffic started to gridlock that flying cars would be invented to overcome congestion.
But news values will survive transmission changes, as they have in transit through ink and paper to film, to TV, to computers. The medium is not really key; the message is. What matters is what’s happening in the world; that is what people want to be sure has been reliably aggregated and is being powerfully presented through sharp writing, great pictures, clever graphics, wide coverage. You have to trust the output: and for that you need an editor, a fact-checker, an accountable individual, which means trained journalists. The demand side not the supply side will determine news. Publishing, in whatever form, will remain.
As to the “economics of free”, Rupert Murdoch has now declared war on aggregators like Google. This month he started putting News International coverage behind a ‘paywall’. Will his general interest papers be able to mimic the model of financial journalism like the FT, Economist, WSJ? Watch this space.
The opinions and views expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of Echo Research, its staff or any of its affiliates.
Labels: Murdoch, New Media, Newspapers, Paywall
posted by Echo Research @ 00:25
2 Comments
2 Comments:
Interesting post, Nigel. I think there will be room for well structured quality content as well as more informal sources delivered through myriad media. It certainly looks like AOL is betting on quality content:AOL is planning to hire hundreds of journalists, editors and videographers in the coming year as it builds out its content-first business model
http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=144334
All the best
Jon Moody
Jon, that's very interesting, and new to me. AOL look to be betting on readers aggregating around a few big sites for news content, like the Guardian is, and where incidentally Alan Rusbridger's gamble on big-scale free digital content as the coming model has consumed tens of millions of pounds for no return .... yet.
Will watch AOL with fresh interest.
A (completely different) thought: AOL used to stand for America On Line until they rebranded to give themselves a more global flavour. But I've heard their non-US competitors may now start pointing to AOL's 'America' connection to make them look both parochial and foreign. Obama's been doing something like that with BP, calling it British Petroleum - though in other ways the two cases are worlds apart.
Nigel
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