Funmurphys: the Blog

The Future of News?

There have been two things that have marked the news business from its start: distinction by time and media. That is to say, the news business has been divided up by when and how the information is delivered. Right now we have three media: paper, TV, and Radio, and we have several times a day, daily, weekly, and monthly. Media has often determined when information is delivered. Now some news ownership may span multiple media and times, but typically the gathering and dissemination end of the business has stayed fractured in those cases even while the business end of the business may have been more closely meshed.

What is the future of news? Convergence. I know that's a buzzword of long duration but little effect, but that doesn't mean that it's time won't ever arrive. Sure, we've seen some of the future already with different news media putting their product on the web, but you know instantly what kind of parent organization produced the product based on content and how it is organized and presented. But convergence will arrive, and with it, the balkanization of news delivery will end. CBS news will compete directly -- in the same time and media -- with the NYT, the WaPo, and even the St. Louis Post Dispatch and KMOV. OK, nothing you haven't heard before, just barely seen.

With this digital convergence, the media will be the internet, not the airwaves or paper, and the time will always be now, not tomorrow's edition or the 10 O'Clock broadcast. And so we will go from the push model to the pull model, and a great deal of the conventions of the news media will go out the window. Information will not be structured the way it is now. It is unhelpful to have information thrown into broad category buckets like "international news" or "entertainment" and then below that a series of unrelated articles - articles based on the current model of puting out a slug of info at a certain time - even when the articles are related.

Quite frankly, time will disappear as a basic organization element - it makes no sense when information is updated on an as gathered basis and grabbed by different people at different time. I think we'll see a persistant structure populated by dynamic data -- kind of like libraries (only more dynamic). While you know where to go look for a certain subject, what's actually on the shelves changes with time - as new books are written. Only in the case of news, I think you'll just get down to a single file that is updated, rather than a series of files over time (which is how we get news stories today).