Listen to the technology….
New technologies require new ways of thinking.
This is often the hardest thing for us to do.
Too often we simply take old ways of working and plug in new technologies.
Andy Grove (above), longtime CEO of Intel said “listen to the technology. The technology will tell you what to do”.
Since their creation, news organizations have been linear, top-down organizations. We find the news, we give it to you. Whether it was newspapers, radio or television, the model was always the same. We make it, you receive it.
When newspapers and now television came to the web, they carried with them their linear model. Go to NYtimes. com online and what do you see but a newspaper. Admittedly it is a bit tricked out, but it is still a newspaper. We have the reporters, you have the eyeballs.
But maybe the whole model is wrong.
As news migrates to the web, maybe we should completely rethink the model by listening to the technology instead of trying to force our model onto the technology.
The web is a far more dynamic place than simply a platform upon which to print a paper. Left to its own devices, this new technology is slowly yet organically creating an architecture of its own making. You can see the result in places like Facebook or Twitter. These are popularly called Social Networks – sites that join up like-minded people to communicate and share information.
Now, what is journalism but the original social medium?
Isn’t journalism predicated upon the idea of sharing news, information and opinion with a larger community and doing it as fast as possible?
Is this not what Twitter and Facebook are all about?
Don’t they (as opposed to the printed page) represent a far more facile and compliant format for news and information that do WCBS news at 11 or the pages of the New York Times, even if they are pasted on a website?
This thought occurred to me yesterday when I was addressing the management of Radio Free Europe.
RFE/RL is essentially already a social network.
Its community is one made up of reporters and stringers spread across more than a dozen countries, some with very repressive conventional presses. The other half of its community is its listener base, eager for information, and often equally eager to give feedback or share their opinions.
Journalistic institutions such as newspapers or radio stations were built at a time when the technology only allowed a broadcast (one source to many) model for distribution. It was the best we could do at the time but it was a compomise with what journalism really demands.
Pure journalism is in reality far more coherent with the architecture of the emerging Internet2.0.
A community laced together through common interests and eager to carry on a multilogue, (as opposed to listen to a monologue).
Imagine a world in which all participants, (providers of information as well as receivers) were bound together in a vibrant, ever-changing and living network in which the loci of conversation and discourse was bits of news information, sewed like grains of sand in an oyster – around which pearls of communal discourse could be permitted to grow.
Interesting?
Suppose all journalists and stringers were provided with flipcams and laptops and access to a web architecture which would allow them to continually feed content. Supposed that the news organization, instead of being the creator of content was instead a moderator of content whose primary task was to verify information and edit and focus content and shepherd the ongoing multilogue.
Suppose this ran 24 hours a day, as opposed to a nightly newscast or a daily printing of the paper?
Suppose this was a rich tapestry of text, video, still, graphics, blogs, letters, emails and twitter remarks.
Is this a model for a ‘newspaper’ for the 21st century?
For a news service?
For a locus of community information and public discourse?
The pieces to construct this are all in place already. The intense popularity of places like Facebook.com clearly demonstrate that the architcture resonates well with the public.
Facebook and Twitter married to relevant content?
Why not?
