Part 2 of a post I started yesterday. The first part outlined the problem and the second part outlines what we will see in the future.
You can find the first part of this post here.
The major news players already have an online presence and I don’t see that going away. However, this doesn’t mean that they’ll be able to make any money. I think news outlets will continue to close and consolidate until there are only two main voices left. Those two voices will probably represent the mouthpieces for two diametrically opposed political parties. I think the big change will be at the local level. I think that we will see more and more local papers collapsing. I then think we could see the rise of the independent journalist.
This type of journalist will not be tied to a station but rather will report directly to the people interested via the internet. They will probably post stories and survive based on micro payments for each individual story that they write. People will be able to have access to their list of available stories and will pick off an individual story if it sounds interesting. I think we’ve already seen this sort of behavior with bloggers and with a bunch of soon to be ex-journalists flooding the market, I think they will expand this niche. They will be providing the news without the extra weight of a station or paper surrounding them.
A major problem that is going to stem from this is one of accountability. We generally trust reporters for major networks these days because we (or at least I) assume that if they’re willfully lying or are wrong too many times, they could sink their whole network. But if you’re only working for you, who cares if you’re wrong? If you need to eat and you have to make up some news to do it, what choice do you have? I think this is where crowd sourcing and the availability of many different viewpoints will win out. If an independent journalist is wrong too many times, the crowd will know. Then that journalist will no longer be counted on for factual information. I generally assume that the truth of a story lies somewhere in between what I hear on Fox News and what I hear on CNN. I think the same will be true in the future. But I believe you’ll see many more independent journalists all be able to deliver their information simultaneously and what macro information floats to the top in terms of repetition is most likely the truth or at least closest to it.
I am not saying this is necessarily a good thing because we’ve seen before that just because the populous believes something to be true does not make it true. There will be many problems with this system, but I believe it’s coming. News networks are already taking their cues from Twitter feeds as they become more afraid of being scooped on quickly breaking stories. The collapse of traditional media and the rise of instantaneous 24 hour communication will make it so that everyone and no one is an expert. This has been true for some time now so I am not really predicting anything new here. The only difference will be that this is how all our news will work. It won’t be a fad with only a few people doing it but it will become the norm. What we are really seeing is the death of the ‘slow to report but make sure you got it right’ journalism.
But it’s not all bad. All these simultaneous viewpoints make it easier than ever for us to get whatever information we want. If we are somewhat responsible about what information we seek out and who we listen to, we will be much better educated in the long run. So I guess it’s the same story as always. Technology itself is neither bad nor good, it’s all in how you use it.
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