Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine provides some interesting background to EPIC 2014 the brilliant flash movie sepculating on the future of news. In his post, Jeff tells us that EPIC 2014 was inspired by an argument over this speech from January 2004 by Martin Nisenholtz Chief Executive Officer, New York Times Digital. I had not read Pong of Electronic Publishing (read the speech to understand the title) until today and am glad to be able to read it now, sixteen months after it was delivered. History is showing that Nisenholtz was on the mark in many areas and off the mark in others. The most significant passage from the speech in my view is:
Users will be able to associate content from a wide variety of sources, including filtered access to other users, through a common interface. Online communities will be available to discuss any “article” at any time of the night or day. A user lands on the article and discussions about that article are continuous. News reports become a focal point for social networking. Again, we see this bubbling-up in Web logs today.
In this vision, two very important boundaries which all of us have grown up with, know and understand change. The first is authority. In a newspaper or in a television news broadcast, the journalistic experience is one-way and bounded. In this new experience, sources range and are scored.
A professionally crafted restaurant review will –in my opinion – bring the same kind of authority to the user in the digital world as it does today. But this review will be augmented by a range of opinions from others; ranging from other professionals to bloggers to audience. We can already glimpse these scoring mechanisms – and this is just one example – in our rate and review area in our Movies section. As better reputation and recommendation management systems emerge, readers will “empower” new kinds of creators who may emerge from outside of traditional institutions.
As anyone reading this blog might expect, I’ll consider material such as this from Nisenholtz in the context of the existing news and information supply chain since this is where I play the most. In Australia there are 4,600 of us, businesses created in the 1800s by publishers to serve their needs. We’re evolved tremendously since then, of course, yet some of our mind sets remain – such as expecting others to create our future. The world described by Nisenholtz in his speech is becoming a reality and while newspapers and magazines will not die, the mass market model of the past will change. Who knows if EPIC 2014 will become a reality. Some could be excused for thinking it will given the moves by Google in recent years.
The supply chain is in play yet many in the supply chain don’t know that. It’s business as usual for them and that’s bad for business.
My view is that businesses which rely on newspapers and magazines for 50% of their traffic need to reinvent urgently, not away from news and information but allied to. They (we) need to connect locally. The need to be part of the mobile citizen driven new media. They need to be leading the change rather than chasing behind and grabbing at crumbs.
This is one reason we’re playing with a citizen journalism model and in some other areas. We’re making plenty of mistakes and enjoying picking ourselves up for another go.
The key focus for the traditional news and information channel is to understand that we’re the final point in the supply chain. We’re content retailers. What else we do to be relevant needs to fit with this.