Guest Post: Journalists Must Adapt or Fade

by Mark Evans

In the wake of the recent court decision in California that essentially deemed bloggers to be journalists, there has been growing discussion about who's a journalist and what role do professional newsrooms play at a time when user-created content is getting so much hype as the next big thing.

To be honest, the whole user-created content phenemona is interesting but, frankly, way overblown.

The biggest problem/challenge with user-created content is much of it is pretty awful stuff with little or no insight or perspective. As more and more content (blogs, podcasts, etc.) is created, it becomes increasingly difficult to filter the good stuff (quality, intelligent material) from the dreck.

This is where news organizations have an opportunity to play a leading role in the content game by using their resources (people, money) and brands to attract readers. At the end of the day, Technorati isn't going to do as good a job directing people to the good stuff as brand names such as the National Post, New York Times, Wall St. Journal and Washington Post.

Of course, traditional news organizations will only be relevant and successful if they adopt the new communication tools to reach readers, particularly younger people who don't read as many newspapers or watch as much television anymore.

Rather than tip-toeing onto the Web, news organizations need to enthusiastically use blogs, podcasts and video blogs the way NPR does. This means reporters need to stop thinking of themselves as one-dimensional content creators, and start creating content using a variety of tools. At the same time, news organizations must stop trying to force-feed traditional business models to the Web.

Newspapers, for example, need to give up trying to sell online subscriptions because there's too much free information available from hundreds of other sources. Instead, newspapers need to embrace relevant-based advertising to complement their high-quality content.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing traditional news organizations is changing their stripes. Many of these organizations have operated pretty much the same way for decades so changing their corporate DNA will take time, and it could be quite painful.

The blunt truth, however, is they have no choice but to adapt because user-created content is changing the content game and who gets to create it. The upside is it's still early days so news organizations that "get it" will stand a good chance of staying on top of the content heap.

Mark Evans is a senior technology reporter at the National Post and blogs here. Mark has been covering the high-tech industry for the past 10 years, including at the South China Morning Post and Bloomberg News. Mark also co-founded Blanketware Corp., which offered natural language navigation services for corporate portals.

Interested in writing a guest-column on disruption? Contact The Disruption Group here.

Comments

[Paul Paetz]

What dictates relevance, accuracy and quality is not whether a business organization has an established brand. If we believed that, The Toronto Star wouldn't be such a joke, the NY Times (paper of record) wouldn't have reporters blatantly plagiarizing and making up stories and presenting them as fact, and Dan Rather would still have his job. In fact, there's a certain arrogance about that statement that belies the writer's own professional bias.

Indeed, 99.9% of blogs are junk. It is far easier to encounter a blog about teenage top ten band lists, or suicide, or girls just yacking, or poorly written and poorly thought out opinion, than it is to find the few that are well-written reliable sources of fact and thought leadership.

However, discriminating readers can certainly tell which is which, and I don't need the LA Times to tell me who to read (in fact, I would probably discredit anything the blogger said if they did). And, increasingly the traditional mainstream media rely on bloggers for their tips about hot news. Remember the Kryptonite lock scandal -- it broke first on a blog. Dan Rather's bias and the incompetent fact-checking of CBS was first identified on a blog, as was the original story about Bush's National Guard record.

So, bloggers can be just as credible as traditional journalists (many of them are journalists), and over time, they too establish brands for themselves and reputations for quality reportage. The key difference though, is that as an individual, they don't have to kowtow to the business interest of a paper, or its particular editorial slant, or to the legal straightjacket strapped on by the organization, or to the editor's fancy, or to the paper's editorial focus.

That, and the immediacy of blogs is what make them so powerful, and increasingly for me, the first place I turn to stay aware. I trust only two traditional publications to reliably get it right or admit when they didn't: The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. And, yes, they too have an editorial bias, but it is less than anyone else's and it is pretty consistent and therefore easy to filter.

Regarding the business model of traditional papers, I don't necessarily agree with Evans opinion there either. The Wall Street Journal does fine charging for access because a) it is priced fairly, b) it is a quality product, and c) they do a lot of original research and reporting, not just what comes off the AP, Reuters and Businesswire lines.

The real message about business model is that being part of a chain of papers that replicates 90% of its stories across the country, and whose writing and reportage is not of sufficiently high quality to challenge the best bloggers is a dead business. We don't read papers because of how they make their money. We read them for the content and enjoyment. Same as blogs.

So, if papers want to be relevant, they need to first focus on who their readers are (almost impossible to be for everyone today) and then write compelling and useful content for their readership. If they do that, they'll be able to make money, regardless of business model. In fact, I think it is only a matter of time before some major paper goes "all blog, all the time".

[Nathan Rudyk]

Compare this statement from Mark Evans:

"The biggest problem/challenge with user-created content is much of it is pretty awful stuff with little or no insight or perspective."

To this more idealistic view from Tim O'Reilly - the guy who had the first commercial Web site on the Net in 1993, and who some accuse of being Spinmaster Daddy 2.0:

"... the real heart of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence. And it's for that same reason that I argue that Web 2.0 represents not just a turning point for the computer industry but for the world as a whole."

For more deep thots from Tim, see: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/my_commencement_speech_at_sims.html

Personally, I think Web 2.0 tools like peer ranking/community voting systems (think how iTunes ranks podcasts from all over the world) will take care of Mark Evans' dreck issue (agree there's dreck among the 40-million-plus blogs tracked today by Technorati, disagree that Web 2.0 search engines and tools won't allow us to navigate through it to the good stuff, including Evans's blog, just as Google does today for most Web 1.0 sites).

There's some evidence to suggest that mainstream media organizations need not feel too smug in their franchises.

Take a look at this thread from the world of Mac trade press, where despite the iPod lift to the Apple brand, mere drecky bloggers appear to be taking the piss out of their mainstream media counterparts (follow the comments down to what Mac info consumers have to say):

http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0604magazines.html

[Mark Goldberg]

I agree with you.

As I wrote in my posting 'Finding Forrester': Newspapers and magazines present a somewhat more authoritative voice, conforming to at least a modicum of journalistic ethics and with varying degrees of political bias to match the desires of their target audience.

The traditional media have editors that help filter the journalists - in effect imposing responsibilities to justify their journalistic freedoms.

http://mhgoldberg.com/blog/2006/05/finding-forrester.html