All Newspaper Content Is Not The Same Either

Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in, wrote a terrific post on SAI last week about three competencies – aggregation, curation and networks – that he thinks represent the future of newspaper organizations.

I agree with the sentiment of Mark’s post and I think all three of his pillars will play a role in establishing the new best way that a lot of content is efficiently created, organized and distributed online.

However, I don’t think it represents a complete solution for newspaper organizations. It probably wasn’t meant to because Mark only talks about local news but the title of the article was rather sensationalist (although this may well have been edited by SAI).

I’d take the curation part of the framework one step further and add increased journalist interaction with readers and the subjects they cover. I’d like to see a world where journalists add explicit gestures to the content they curate in order to collect followers and build communities.

Like readers, the content formerly found in newspapers is not all the same. Content that used to be separate sections of a newspaper is produced online by lots of different types of companies and individuals. It’s also presented at different times in different contexts and is used for different purposes.

Reviews of books and restaurants might be found on blogs, user review sites or social networks or in the case of Amazon reviews at the point of sale. A Frank Bruni restaurant review serves a completely different purpose than a user review (or ten) on Yelp.

Real estate listings from brokers are written up on neighborhood blogs, aggregated directly online and found using searches multiple, changeable criteria and some use maps to help people visualize precisely where properties are in relation to local transport or amenities.

Different revenue models have already started to emerge in some verticals. Online job boards are mostly driven by search and alerts that might be ad supported but some are also charging companies to post jobs and charging applicants to view jobs.

Newspaper organizations face stiff, vertical competition in most areas including sports, entertainment, business, technology and politics either from native online media or the online outposts of cable television stations, magazines and trade publications. This is before even getting to blogs and local news.

This means the idea that there will be a single, industry-wide solution that will replace existing newspaper revenue streams and enable everything else to continue as normal represents a very narrow view of the problem.

Jeff Jarvis says as much in this blog post while reporting the creation of an investigative journalism fund by the Huffington Post which could help to support another part of the news puzzle.

Academic researchers in most if not all fields are forced to spend a lot of time trying to get research projects funded. It’s not beyond belief that a similar model might be necessary for journalism projects that are socially important but need to be funded rather than bought.

While the problems newspapers face are ostensibly related to the medium and the business model, it is also hard to separate the type of content they produce from those two things because newspaper content is constrained by its context.

The Web has enabled us to find and use information efficiently in the context that we need it, whereas newspapers present information in only one context at the start of each day and that is ‘what is happening in the world?’

Just as it made sense for newspapers to aggregate content on a wide range of subjects to broaden their appeal, online content has become organized into deep verticals online because it helps to place it in context in the moment.

As a result, solutions to the current problem need to address all of the content types found in newspapers differently because online technology is being applied to content verticals in different ways and (different) people are using it to do different things.

Posted on March 30, 2009