Future of news update

Michael Wolff captures the future of news, or at least one version in his Vanity Fair piece, Is This the End of News?

The news is technologically obsolete—information envelops us, competing for our attention, hence fewer and fewer people (read: younger people) feel any need to seek it out. This has resulted in a rapidly aging audience for all news media—the adult-diaper crowd—which is sending advertisers scurrying to find more energetic buyers. The view among newspeople is that this is a chronic condition: for 40 years there's been a falling off of the news audience, something on the order of 1 percent a year. Not good, but we in news can make it to retirement. In the last three years, however, that gradual decline has turned into a mud slide. It's suddenly almost 10 percent a year and growing. We won't make it.

Source: vanityfair.com

The story basically captures the essence of the now classic, EPIC 2014 and its updated EPIC 2015 new media parables of the future of news, in a narrative form. This is the McLuhanesque realization that when we live in a world immersed in information, we need "meta-news narratives," about the ebb and flow of information and how we are using it, and why.
Contrasting the enigma wrapped in cliches that is Katie Couric with Jim Romensko's blog, Media Gossip, where Romenesko collected and analyzed what everyone else was covering as news, Wolff says,

Romenesko, proving that the news itself—how it appeared, and where, and with what frequency—had a pattern, a meaning, that, if properly deciphered, was, in itself, newsworthy

Source: vanityfair.com

What Wolff has come to suspect, and is going to bank on, through his Newser.com site, is that "googlization" of news along with ubiquitous access to all the information in the world via our always-on connections to the web, sets us smack in the middle of a world where the web is the editor.

What's more, those public institutions have maintained their primacy and value because they were the ones controlling and delivering information—that was the news. Now we've given everybody undreamed-of information and publishing tools. And millions of those people have become more adept at using them than have the people who run the heretofore public world.

Source: vanityfair.com

And the news is about what we are all looking at and how and why that has captured our attention. Today, attention is currency, as in news and money and news is information and how we are using it.

See also, Peter M. Zollman's E-Media Tidbit

NowPublic

Tags: disruptivetech | futureofnews | news