Blogs are the future of news, for me.
In future, news will come to me via blog. I will subscribe to blog by subject matter. Each blog will serve as a curator for one news subject. Some will be very specific, others will be big-picture views of a field. One blog could focus on Middle Eastern news, another on general science news, another on news of the ecological status of the arctic, another on the Chicago Bears.
Each blog will build trust from its readers by reliably presenting every significant story connected to this subject matter. Each blog curator will add value by providing context, assessing the veracity of the story, and providing links to relevant background information. Blog curators will *not* deconstruct or attack stories on these blogs – this is not their function and will reduce value. This kind of comment can happen on a separate blog channel.
Of course, the simple act of selecting a story to cover, and providing context a certain way, does provide a sort of comment – it is impossible to escape some degree of bias and framing in any news service. Blog presentation minimises the problems associated with this by being self-consciously personalised. As a reader, I will select blogs on topics that are of interest to me, and over time I will get to know the personalities of the blog authors.
Curator blogs will voluntarily associate with each other to make semi-formal news networks. News networks will operate in a dense, flat network rather than a hierarchy.
News will come straight off the wire services, paid for by advertising leveraged across the whole network – the advertising, like much online advertising, will be content-specific and at a remove from the content providers, to remove undue ‘Manufacturing Consent’-style influence.
It will be easy to select the news content you are interested in following and build it into a single newsfeed. It will be possible to follow multiple blogs on one topic, particularly valuable if the topic is contentious (e.g. anything political).
Newsblogging is work. Some people will try and not do a good job. PR operations will set up shill curators. Other curators will be offered pay-for-play deals. Reputation will be everything. It will still be much better than the current system.
This system will effectively function as a parasite on the mainstream media services, while simultaneously raising the profile of good content from other news sources such as Indymedia. In time, freelance journalists will be able to offer their content direct to these news services – writing articles, then getting the word out wide to the relevant newsblogs, getting linkage and eyeballs in response, and earning their keep via the advertising revenue on their own pages. Some people are already doing this.
The infrastructure isn’t quite there, but soon it will be.
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All the above speculation performed with not a single coffee in me yet today. Anyone want to deconstruct this or present a more plausible scenario?
3 thoughts on “How I Will Get News”
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Reminds me of this
http://robinsloan.com/epic/
The only bit I’d say is unlikely is that this sort of blog will be focused on a particular area. Reflecting the interests of the creator(s), there’s going to be a number that cover a collection of different areas. For example, boingboing.
As a data point, I already get my news this way.
Billy: interesting, will look closer at that.
Mike: I’ll finesse my point a little. I think that the integration of tagging and RSS will get more sophisticated so that you can restrict your feed to content with a certain tag. (I think this is already functionality in some RSS readers, but it’s low profile if it does exist.) So if you’re into the sphere of digital copyright, but don’t have much interest in the other BoingBoing stuff, you can set up a feed just for that. Conversely, content producers such as the BoingBoing bloggers will be more conscious of the “tag channels” within their blogs, and aware that each channel will serve a different (but overlapping) audience. So, yes, a given newsblog might have a varied remit, but each strand of that should function more or less as an independent blog.
This whole idea presupposes the continued rise of tagging as the core information designator on the net; it may be that until we get some good low-AI automated tagging systems, the infrastructure just won’t be able to function the way I think it wants to.
And yeah, I get most of my news via blogs too; you see that people are analysing something, then link back to understand what they’re analysing. The next step I see is blogs becoming more conscious of their role being news-distribution as well as news-analysis – at the moment, noncontentious but newsworthy content doesn’t make it into the blogs, so they’re unreliable as a primary channel for information.