The future will be “hyper-local”--or will it?

“On the web, everyone will be famous to 15 people”, David Weinberger

We all know we are passing through an exhilarating period of rapid and urgent upheaval in the way we receive news and commentary on the world. Who will leave the field victorious and who will numbered among the slain is less clear.

Many pundits are putting their money on “non-traditional” online media, of which this blog is a tiny and insignificant part. Here is the manifesto of what is apparently the largest “citizen journalism” site in the world, OhmyNews, based in South Korea, the country with the highest internet coverage per capita in the world.

Traditional means of news gathering and dissemination are rapidly falling behind the new paradigm … We believe news is something that is made not only by a George W Bush or a Bill Gates but, more importantly, by people who are allowed to think together. The news is a form of collective thinking. It is the ideas and minds of the people that are changing the world, when they are heard.

Echoing the OhmyNews manifesto, this week’s Economist asks “Who killed the newspaper?” For anyone brought up on the solid virtues of newspapers such as the New York Times, the Guardian, or Le Monde, the future looks bleak and small-scale. The most profitable new papers are free and contain not analysis of foreign policy but “hyper- local” news (with extracts from blogs and detailed community news).

The approach is summed up by the editor of Bluffton Today, a successful local paper in North Carolina, quoted in the Economist:

Back in the 1940s and 1950s papers used to be full of what we call “chicken-dinner news” – the speakers at civic clubs and whose daughter won a blue ribbon in canoeing. But then newspapers started to lose touch with their readers.

The seemingly inexorable rise of “journalism without journalists” is questioned by Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker:

the content of most citizen journalism will be familiar to anybody who has ever read a church or community newsletter—it’s heartwarming and it probably adds to the store of good things in the world, but it does not mount the collective challenge to power which the traditional media are supposedly too timid to take up.

Being the cautious fellow I am, my view is that it will be some time before we see an outright victory by one side or the other; rather we will ebb and flow between the traditional and the niche. Like most people it seems, I spend less time reading papers than I used to do and my always limited television time has dwindled to the odd Premier league football game and snatched BBC news programs while I put on my tie in the morning. The hours I used to spend turning newspaper pages have been taken up with quick skims of my favourite blogs in the Philippines and elsewhere, glancing at internet editions of papers, and using aggregators like Google News or Arts and Letters Daily. I guess my scope has widened but my understanding is shallower, which seems to be pretty much the same for others too.

Still, I think there will be a slight swing back to “traditional” media, simply because the standards that have guided the best reporting are not all pompous bullshit to be swept away with a flick of the mouse. Much as I love the blogs and other online media I visit, I sure wouldn’t want them to be my only window on the world. Newspapers may be in the their twilight years, but I think it will be a long northern dusk rather than a rapid tropical sundown. Let’s raise our glasses to their survival, for a few years yet anyway.

Comments

[Wil]

traditional media can be good, but it can also be biased. at least blogs don't make apologies for being biased. also, traditional media will always be around b/c they are on location. Also, interviewing the people in stories is always necessary. many blogs are just opinions and don't necessarilly interview the people in their posts. i'm not saying blogs are bad b/c of that, but it's always better to read an article that uses a primary source instead of a secondary source. unless bloggers start doing what Kevin Sites ( http://hotzone.yahoo.com ) does, which is actually going to where the story is, then traditional media will always be around. just my 2 cents.

[torn]

Hi Wil -- Good observations. I think the author of the New Yorker article would agree with you. What he takes issue with is the 34% of the 12 million bloggers in America who consider themselves "journalists". As you imply, sitting in front of a computer and waffling away is not reporting. The best reporters use up a lot of shoe leather and work their contacts hard; most bloggers would not have any idea how to begin an investigative story.

The most interesting recent development to me is these hybrid sites like Ohmynews. They really do have the potential to change the way we report the news, though whether that will ever be fully realized is another matter.

As for whether newspapers will always be around, I think that will be a commercial decision. If there is money to be made, sure, proprietors will still back their papers. On the other hand, newspapers are hugely expensive operations and cannot be run as charitable or vanity projects. If eveyone is away doing something else there will be no commercial point and newspapers will die. Check out the Economist article, which has an interesting example from Norway of a newspaper that is adapting successfully to the digital challenge.

Thanks for the Kevin Sites link -- will take a look.

[eric aka senor enrique]

Hunch tells me time will soon come when traditional media with online presence will pull some good bloggers for strategic alliance purposes as what happened with Sassy Lawyer and Manila Standard.

I like the idea of citizen journalism that is "heartwarming and adds to the store of good things in the world."

[Carla]

Hi Torn. I agree with you that it will take a few more years (or probably a decade) to see how "new media" impact on traditional media (and the world, for that matter). Every time a new medium is invented, there is always some celebratory discourse about how it's going to change the world for the better. There *has* been change and there will be more, but the transformation will probably not be as complete nor as positive as hoped.

There's the quesiton of editorial standards, as you mentioned, there's accountability as well. Beyond the impact on the practice of journalism, there's the impact on democracy itself, our conception of which is inextricably bound with the media. What interests me is the possibility of atomization, when the mind-boggling number of blogs and other online platforms undercut shared references. Putnam calls this "cyberbalkanization" and I think it's particularly important in polities (like the Philippines) where deep socio-economic cleavages already exist. When one tiny segment of Filipinos is reading Manolo Quezon while the rest are watching DEBATE...

It's very fashionable to talk about dissent and "communities" enabled by the Internet but we really should be more modest. And we should take into account that technology and media within different contexts. What the Internet and blogging may enable in the West--actually, America-- may not be replicated in the developing world. It's not just a question of Internet access but also of media systems and political culture.

[Skunkeye]

I found that New Yorker magazine very interesting - I actually have had some experience dealing ohmynews with sourcing when I was at VOA - and also have had a family member interviewed by the site sveral times - and they are generally though to be pretty reputable and reliable.
I don't know what it is like in the Philippines, but the traditional, mainstream media - tv, print- is relying more and more on blog-generated material - maybe its just a phase - maybe its just laziness on the behalf of editors and journalists since there seems to be so much stuff on the internets for the taking. For example, tonight I finally caught the revamped CBS evening news with Katie Couric - big media circus here in the States- and it seemed a good quarter of the broadcast was devoted to whats happening in the blogosphere and internet world- maybe they are just trying to be "hip." And maybe that spells the decline of it alll this blogging madness!