Once upon a time, people that wanted to read news bought a newspaper. The way newspapers were organized meant people often read one article on a potentially broad range of topics as they made their way through the paper.
Now though, search engines and news aggregators make it possible to read many articles or blog posts on a specific story from many different sources. Stories can be detached from one another and put back together alongside other stories on the same topic.
This is natural and more efficient for readers because there is no relationship between two stories just because they’re published on the same day (and there never was).
The diagram below provides a very simplistic view of this change. News stories have been separated from newspapers the same way iTunes separated songs from albums (although, there are inherent differences between digital music and digital news that I plan to talk about in a future post).
None of this is revelatory at this point but the important thing is not that this has become possible but that it’s preferable. The way news is organized on the Web means people can inform themselves before drawing their own conclusions. It’s the most natural way people process information and what they have always done. It’s just that before we were constrained in our ability to get all of the information in one place.
Even more importantly, and at this point it’s become a cliche, is that comments and social media have turned stories into conversations. And conversations occur between people. This makes news like other forms of information – people want to get it from other people – people they trust.
We can think of it as word of mouth marketing. It’s logical to think that personal relationships are just as powerful for spreading news content as they are for recommending products and services. This means news published or sent to us by people (we trust) could be more valued than the news brand itself.
Despite all this, the area that seems to get the most attention, including (understandably) from news organizations, is the lack of monetization at the initial point of finding or serving news. A lot has been written on whether Google is detrimental or if news organizations need to embrace the ways of the Web in order to feature prominently in search results.
However, what happens afterward during the conversations around news is potentially more important. Journalists that start and take part in conversations can help people choose to bypass search engines and go direct to the source of news.
The distraction is that reader participation in the form of comments or blog entries is seen as undermining the position of professional journalists. In reality, we are saying they want more from them, not less. We want them in conversations, even leading them, precisely because we do respect their expertise and we want to be informed by them.
By taking part in the conversations they start, journalists can build relationships and turn readers into followers, and in the long-term followers are far more valuable. In the next post, I’ll talk about why.
Posted on March 12, 2009
My name is Phillip Baker and this is my personal blog about finding value in a world of free information.