Gaffney3.com

The failure of the media industry as a whole is not the result of its distribution model.  Those that seek to solve the current problems by technologies that provide “lift-and-shift” will not miraculously resuscitate newspapers and newsrooms.  The failure is not the medium, it is its model.

Plastic Logic … launched its new electronic reader last week …[with] the look, if not feel, of reading paper.  Just right … for reading digitalised newspapers… You can turn from page to page, as though you were holding a newsprint bundle.  You can pause, perfectly normally, over tales that surprise you, news that you didn’t know.

From Peter Preston, The Observer, September 14, 2008

This product by Plastic Logic is extremely interesting, but providing a similar experience to reading a newspaper alone isn’t the answer.  The unfortunate reality is that MSM companies across the country are still pressuring their heads of tech to solve their economic woes rather than recognizing that the product itself is flawed.  The good news is that it can be fixed.  The bad news is that technology isn’t the solution.

The flaw is MSM’s insistence upon news being a one-directional conversation where the editors refuse to engage readers in direct discourse.  The flaw is the insistence on a lecture rather than a debate.  The flaw is the disconnect from the community which they pledge to serve.

The solution is that the culture itself needs to change.  This is obviously easy to say, but monumental to implement.  But those earliest to start this cultural shift will not only survive, but lead.

Digg, Wikipedia and Reddit represent the sharing of power readers are looking for with their news providers. They allowing for the nature ebb and flow of topics as they rise into the collective consciousness of their communities.

This is the future, where the user editor suggests content to millions of other user editors. This is the future of news online. We, the providers, supply the content while the users edit and decide on prominence and dissemination.

From Justin William, CounterValue, September 14, 2008

Sites like these are the newspapers of today.  They are destinations not for a specific topic but rather for the quality of news and information that is peer created, selected, filtered or promoted.  Interestingly, Peter Preston’s article cited above speaks of the non-linear value of stumbling across “unexpected things which you didn’t know in the process of telling you what you wanted to know,” yet failures to provide a link to a single example, company or counterpoint mentioned.

Aside:

As always here is the wordle for today’s post “Technology is not Mass Media’s Savior”

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 14th, 2008 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Blogging, Citizen Journalism, Media, Newspapers, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.