media

Social networks, remaking news

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I am writing this in the midst of the January 2011 revolution in Egypt. The unfolding events in Egypt are much more interesting, and, I would argue, clearer on Twitter than on CNN. This is a surprise. Most of what’s on Twitter is not posted by journalists, nor by people who even pretend to be reporting objectively, or checking sources. They simply share what they see, the best among them saying when they are unsure about something. And they let their emotions be part of their postings.

I have followed, for several days, a dozen or so Twitterers who are in Cairo, often among the protesting crowds in Tahrir Square. Their updates have led news from CNN, BBC, and others by as much as hours, and there is nothing like the completeness of view the Twitterers give in the news updates on US Cable TV and on the cable news or newspaper websites. The exception is when those traditional media journalists share their own Tweets.
 
The TV networks are, by contrast, weak vessels of what’s happening, and their strengths—offering context, analysis, and expertise, can blunt, suppress, and sometimes distort what seems to be the truth about what is happening in Egypt. They report, quite even-handedly, what the different factions think, and that allows in not just opinion, but deliberate distortions and distractions. Too often when there’s fresh news, and first-hand views coming from Egypt, they have lined up a New York, or Washington-based expert to tell us what’s happening. They bring in a geopolitical angle—the conversation Henry Kissinger would want to have—instead of a closer focus on what is actually happening. And often they seem simply to be wrong.
 
We don’t yet have the journalism of the future figured out yet—that seems to be happening right now, with the interplay between new forms of sharing like Twitter and conventional journalism. But it’s clear that instant, eye witness reporting and the first-hand views that show up on social network sites will be part of it, and it should. I think the networks and traditional news media recognize that–they're reading the Tweet stream too.
 
Newspaper image: DRB62, via flickr, cc attribution license

The future of news 2: what are the big uncertainties?

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Reading on a KindleI introduced some thinking on the future of news in a previous post. I will continue to work through this question in a standard futures way. So I’ll first lay out thinking on the biggest uncertainties and the driving forces shaping the news business, and then develop some brief scenarios of the future of news. Please note, my examples here, and my experience, are from a US perspective. I would love to hear your thoughts on what is the same or different around the world.

In this post, I offer some of the critical uncertainties for the future of news/journalism:

Centralized or decentralized—over the past few decades, especially, we have grown enormous media businesses such as Time Warner, Clear Channel, etc. But the digital world is pushing out new kinds of news and media that can be small-scale, even the work of one person, yet still have an impact. The news (arguably) site of Matt Drudge is an example. Will we see a future with individual citizen journalists and small teams of individuals producing what we consume as news? We are already seeing that happen. But perhaps also we will see new kinds of big news media organizations. The Huffington Post, a kind of mega-blog, is a great example. So are the online efforts of the well-established news media, including the New York Times, the BBC, and others.

 Who pays? Readers, advertisers, government, philanthropy? Print media has been sustained by print sales and ad revenues for a long time. Both are suffering from the availability of new digitally. The news industry is looking for new sources of revenue, including toying with charging for online access. In the past few years most made their content free, presumably to build online readership in hopes of pay-to-read revenues later, or, hoping to make money on online ad sales. U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) has drafted a bill to make it easier for a news organization to become a not-for-profit, under U.S. law.

Print vs. digital—How much news will continue to be consumed in print, versus in electronic form? The balance is clearly shifting, and people’s reasons for buying print news in newspapers and magazines are changing. We also face uncertain future pressures to reduce print for environmental reasons. Finally, eBooks such as the Kindle are making an attempt to shift readers off print while still giving them a portable, print-like reading experience. How far will this shift take us?

Mediated/edited vs. “raw” information—The long history of print media has meant that the information we consume is selected and edited, with supposed objectivity, by professional journalists, or, at least, by people who publish for a living. That’s changing with the Internet. Much more of what we consume is loosely edited or unedited, inconsistently contextualized, not fact-checked, and idiosyncratic to its producers: website operators, bloggers, blog commenters, and so on. What could it mean to shift away from a journalistic approach to news production—what do we lose?

Broadcast versus collaboration—While traditional media is broadcast—a media entity prepares and shares the news with its readers, the Internet enables news media to be collaborative, with the readership participating also as contributors, commentators, and so on. That is the power of the digital world in the context of news media. Does that new capability outweigh concerns about loss of objectivity and professionalism? (Thanks to Maxine Teller, MiXT Media for focusing me on this concept)

Objective versus agenda-bearing—So too we worry about the objectivity of what we read. In theory, the traditional news media has been objective, and people worry that the new media news sources have a political bias and agenda. We should remember, of course, that the traditional media is not objective, and comes from a tradition of politicized, agenda-bearing, sometimes “yellow” journalism. Can the public learn to sort out for itself the political or commercial agendas of their news sources?

Local versus national, international—Local news remains critical, but covering it well is expensive. It’s cheaper to draw content from national news sources and republish it in various formats and forms. Can we sustain adequate coverage of local news, especially, of information people need as citizens, consumers, community members, and so on? In my city, Washington, DC, there are interesting examples of online local news coverage, including some with original content, advertising, and substantial readership. See, for example, DCist. DCist often gets the story out first, and has a way of covering local events, crime, culture, and so on, with broad reader participation. Is this the future of local news coverage?

Journalism as business versus public good—Finally, while the news business has been a business, some analysts think it is truly a public good—something essential in society that the market will not necessarily produce enough of. With that in mind, they are looking at ways to enable not-for-profit news media to success and thrive, and even how to turn some commercial news enterprises into 501(c)3 organizations.

These uncertainties are dimensions of the range of possibility for the future of news. They are not binary, either-or propositions. However, for the purposes of exploring the possibilities, we will push deeply out to the ends of the spectrums implied here, to contrast, for example, a print business versus a digital one, or professional journalism versus the “citizen journalist”. Our actual future will almost certainly be a blend of these things.

 
Image: CarbonNYC, via Flickr, cc license

 

The future of news 1: We need better foresight

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Newspaper vending boxes
 
I attended a set of panel discussions last week on the topic “Who pays for the news?” The event was put on by the New America Foundation, a left-side policy think tank. They do a nice job of bringing interesting people into the room on the issues of the day.
 
As a futurist, I loosely filed this event in my mind as “the future of news”. But in fact, it wasn’t about that. The overall message of the morning was about shoring up the news business as we know it, not about the future form that business will take. There was an air of lamentation in the room, and in some cases, denial. It was standard to say “I really love my morning paper—in print!” Much of the discussion was founded on the belief that the news business, as we know it, is essential to a free society.
 
So what went wrong in this discussion? While everyone acknowledged that things have changed for the news business, they didn’t go the extra step of accepting that change and envisioning what’s next. They stayed in a defensive crouch. They boiled the profound change down to its financial elements—the business model no longer works. But they didn’t look with a clear eye at the other big forces at play. [A lone voice among the panelists, Maxine Teller, of MiXTMedia Strategies, did do this.]
 
The New America panelists were in “historic preservation” mode, they wanted to fix the system as we know it, rather than recognize profound change, and chart a new course for the news business. I see the same thing in much of the wider discussion about this that turning up online and in print.
 
But we don’t get to keep the system as we know it. We have to recognize that the world of news and information is being transformed. Digital technology is for the traditional media what Clayton Christensen calls a disruptive technology. That means it comes along, does some of what the old technology could do better and cheaper, and typically pushes the old ways into decline. The disruptor is rarely if ever a perfect substitute for the old technology—it won’t do everything better, and it may do some things worse. That is where our fear lies with the sweeping change hitting news and journalism.
 
The traditionally-minded, and I confess to being one of them, have to recognize some changes in the system, including:
  • Who discovers/edits/shapes/contextualizes our information
  • The divide (apparent or real) between commercial and non-commercial information
  • What is true, objective, etc. vs. what is shaped by an agenda, and, more importantly, what we do about that as consumers of information
  • Timing/time, when something arrives in the news, (i.e. is published) it’s supposed to be a “truth”. It’s now possible for anyone to “publish” anything. So now we have to accumulate information, weigh its validity, and/or wait for confirmation from other messages. “Published” can no longer equate to “true” (if ever it should have).
  • Coverage—how we are sure that information comes to light that should, with a question of whose “beat” is it, versus depending on “crowd-sourcing” for our news—millions of people, anywhere and everywhere, become the beat reporters, sharing information though social networks.
 
Those are some of the questions we need to explore much more as we look at the future of news. I will take some of them up in future “Future of news” posts here.
 
The news business and its key stakeholders, the public, need to take a fresh, well-rounded look at the future possibilities. Scenarios of a 10- or 20-year future, for example, could let us see some ways that news and information would get to people in the era beyond the news business as we know it. Exploring those possibilities could certainly be reassuring—and we seem to need that right now. But it will also allow public policy to shape what it needs to shape, and business to find its new pathways through the digital world and find ways to serve a need and make money too.
 
Image: wili_hybrid, via Flickr, creative commons license

Fighting back for foresight

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With great regularity, journalists and other writers pen pieces on the decline of futures or on failed predictions. Our professional futurist colleagues have often boiled this down to a shorthand: “where’s my flying car?”

We have often joined our colleagues in the Association of Professional Futurists (www.profuturists.org) to compile responses to these pieces. The World Future Society (www.wfs.org) also works hard to counter misperceptions about futurists and foresight work. Most in the field feel that the field is doing well, and that attention to the future is improving around the world. That many of our colleagues in organizations have futures job titles and responsibilities is good evidence for that.

At Leading Futurists LLC we believe foresight is doing well, but that we have more battles yet to fight. The value proposition of the field is changing from provocative “out there” thinking to ideas about change that organizations can respond to today.

Foresight and futures thinking tools are becoming part of everyday strategy making in organizations. Futures-minded people serve on or consult to teams as the people who understand the inevitability of change and what it means to the organization. They bring a knowledge base about the future to bear on an organization’s strategies and actions.

But though foresight is gaining ground, in too many organizations short-term thinking reigns, and it dominates in society overall. We battle the widespread conviction that what is relevant is the immediate scene; this quarter’s performance and today’s issues. Short-term thinking is a condition of organizational life, and it will drive out habitual foresight, if we let it. So let’s get to work on the problem.

Making foresight a daily habit of more people in more organizations is a new kind of work. It is different from just being provocative and wowing an audience with gee whiz ideas about startling new technologies. Here’s what we need to do instead:

  • Keep the future on the agenda, bring up trends and themes of change in work meetings and planning sessions
  • Change what people expect when you talk about the future from the gee whiz, to useful, actionable ideas about emerging challenges and opportunities
  • As you get a new insight on the future from your scanning, think about who the 5 or 6 people in your organization are who you know should see it. Send it along to them with a comment or interpretation. Any busy colleague will appreciate it.
  • Show people how to think about change. Model this by giving people an image of the future that relates to a question they are grappling with. For example, in the packaging sector, you imagine for them a near term future in which every package has a radio-frequency ID tag on it for automated inventory and checkout.

These are some of the things to do to normalize foresight and make it a daily habit in your organization. They are steps toward truly having a Foresight Culture.

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