SEEING THE FUTUREPaid Content is one of many sites attempting to peer into the future. The questions they're asking are: "What's the most important development in -- or affecting -- digital media and entertainment that actually will occur in 2005? What one thing that would make a difference in digital media or entertainment would you most want to see happen in 2005?" and some of the answers so far received are interesting (and not a few of them are a little chilling.) Steve Burrows, for instance, is predicting:
-- More and more users go to the web for their news and continue the migration away from traditional sources like printed media. TV newscasts begin to feel a similar pinch. -- There will be more acquisitions and mergers in the newspaper space, due to the attrition in circulation numbers and corresponding drop in advertising and classified revenues. The last part is prescient: today Tim Porter is reporting that it's estimated that Craigslist is taking as much as $50-65 million a year in potential classified advertising from San Francisco Bay area newspapers. Among those advertising at the online site is the San Francisco Chronicle, which apparently recognizes the strength of its competitor.
(Paid Content will be running responses to its two questions throughout this week.) |
A NEW DAILY READHere's something to add to your list of daily journalism reads: Morph, the Media Centre blog, has signed up five guest bloggers for the month. J.D. Lasica kicked things off today (more on that in a moment). Others in the rotation are Tim Porter of First Draft writing on the newspaper biz, Tom Biro of Media Drop on open media and transparency, Tony Gentile of Buzzhit on the business of blogging, and Susan Mernit (Susan Mernit's Blog), who's keeping on eye on tech. (Links to the individual blogs are at Morph.) Lasica has things off to a rousing start with a look at some of the forces behind the winds of change sweeping across mediascape. He includes Dan Gillmor's decision to forsake legacy media for a citizens journalism gig, the buzz over "the long tail," video blogging and other drivers.
In this morning's San Jose Mercury News, Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, says this: "We are in the middle of a fundamental shift from mass media to the personal media of computers and the Internet...." What[base ']s largely missing from this picture? Old media. While there have been a few media organizations willing to take a dip into these strange new waters, most have remained on shore, aloof, mystified, and maybe even a little afraid. That's a recipe for millions of more citizens routing around traditional media.
I suspect Lasica and Co. will, over the course of the month, provide an extensive look at the forces that are interacting to rewire how we are informed. |
SHOWING ITS SOUL
Apple has done a wonderful thing: replaced everything on the front page of its web site with an appeal for help for tsunami victims, with direct links to agencies trying to help. Microsoft had a similar appeal on its home page, but limited to about a third of the real estate, and without the direct links from the front page. |
NO MORE EXCLUSIVESThe tsunami in the Indian Ocean has unleashed the beginning of the end of another old media practice: the scramble for "exclusive" use to amateur video and still pictures from the scenes of major news events. In some cases, footage that was broadcast on CNN as "just in" had been circulating on the internet for hours. Better still, there was unmediated, easy access to it all. Editors Weblog reports on waveof destruction.org, created by an Australian blogger to host tsunami videos. From last Wednesday to Sunday, it drew more than 680,000 hits to view the more than 25 videos. From the report:
"The ease of putting something online is pretty much instant," says Geoffrey Huntley, the founder of Wave of Destruction. "At a media company, I'm sure there are channels you have to go through -- copyright, legal, editorial, etc. Blogging is instant." UPDATE: Media Bloggers Association has announced an initiative to match hosts willing to donate server space and bandwidth to bloggers who are "providing a tremendous public service" by mounting tsunami videos and often taking a financial hit because of the demand.
This is more than a good news story: it's one of the first examples of widespread financial support for citizen journalists. That's big. |
ON THE EDGE OF MAINSTREAM?A new Pew Institute study on blogging has generated a lot of coverage in Blog World, and the best I've seen comes from Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine. Jarvis does his usual solid job of getting to the meat of the study: 27 per cent of American internet users read blogs (a 58 per cent increase from a similar study done earlier in 2004), seven per cent of users have blogs (which means more than eight million people), 12 per cent have posted comments to blogs. And all that comes against a background of 62 per cent of internet users who don't know what a blog is. The percentages seem small, but the numbers are huge. Technorati tracks about five and a half million blogs from the U.S. and around the world. Only five per cent of internet users are using RSS feeds and news aggregators, but that still equals millions of people. And, as the graph accompanying Jarvis's piece shows, blog readership is growing at a faster pace than blogs. Most telling in the piece is a comment from Kathleen A. that Jarvis has elevated to the main post.
I only found out about blogs in April of 2004 - and never looked back. It has changed the way I gather and use information. It has changed the way I use the internet and it has given me access to communicate with people outside of my world - which I never could have done before. Blogs have changed the world and opened understanding among people's across the globe. The MSM can't compete. The people have the power to cross every boundary and culture. And with the people is where the power belongs. That's my experience, too. Over the past year, the internet and blogs have fundamentally changed the way I get news. Not many years ago, I was reading as many as five newspapers a day, listening to talk radio or CBC throughout the day, and consuming supper-hour and late-night news. No more. Now the vast majority of my news comes to me through internet news sites, RSS feeds, blogs and the ability to chase links. I am more actively engaged with "news." I am reading many more sources, including the "amateur" eyewitnesses to history — those who are living it.
As more people discover this (those 62 per cent of don't know what blogging is and those 95 per cent who haven't discovered the wonders of RSS) — and as the avatars emerge that will make it easier to get to information — blogging will move further and further into the mainstream. Legacy media will be the loser, unless the media as we know it is willing to make fundamental changes. |
HIS OWN QUESTIONRemember the flap that erupted when it was reported that a pointed question for American secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld from an American soldier was "planted" by a journalist? Turns out it wasn't so. Editor & Publisher reports on a coming Times article that quotes Spc. Thomas Wilson as saying he came up with the question about the lack of armour for Army vehicles in Iraq on his own. Not sure why the reporter, Edward Lee Pitts, hasn't reported this. Is it legacy media's (thanks to Jay Rosen for that term) insistence on not making itself part of the story?
SOURCE: TACITUS.ORG |
Last update: 1/30/05; 10:21:30 PM .
