Now & Sooner

It’s been talked about for the last several years, and particularly more energetically of late; it’s been of great concern to businesses and politicians and, I guess, everybody else; I suppose, then, with the concurrent progression of technology, wireless devices, new distribution schemes, blogging, and micro-blogging, it sure the hell is a monumental shift in the democratization of information sharing. Everyone keeps talking about the future of news when in fact we are seeing, reading, and experiencing its modern incarnation (right now! you’re reading a blog on a computer connected to the Internet infrastructure!) Zippity zap, just like that.

Good Journalism

If you haven’t previously read Clay Shirky’s essay, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, do so now. He’s been writing about Internet’s societal effects since the 90s, and his essay is a brilliant primer for what’s going on. After you’ve done that, just take a look at how many articles have cropped up regarding the failing state of the newspaper print industry (the threat of the most profitable New York Times going bust), the decline in television news relevance (I made that up, but I’m probably right), the slump in magazine advertising dollars (though I must say, the Economist has the right idea charging more per issue to segue readers into their subscription model), etc. The printed news — indubitably a beautiful medium — is outdated. Not its content, necessarily, but the medium itself. Apart from its better typography, receiving news a full day or week after it happens — without the ability to hyperlink to images, related articles, content, and discussion threads — is infinitely inferior to the distribution model the Internet affords.

Just look at the publishers scrambling to find a solution to their woes. It isn’t any single device that will necessarily be the salvation of the printed news world — though the iPhone and Amazon Kindle do provide improved means of accessing news; It will be good, quality journalism. As Shirky puts it–

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

The medium no longer matters. Once everything is digital, it can be transferred back to something physical. Print out an article if you want to hold it. Sure, the typography (which I’ll sorely miss) gets lost in translation, but the content is there. And I’ll make a strong argument that with the approach of HTML 5, news websites have the opportunity to at least make their destination pages look more like a newspaper, with better graphic design, better type usage, and (I hope) a throw-back to the delight of stumbling upon interesting articles.

But strong, relevant, and truthful journalism still must be at its core. The rise and popularity of blogging proved that news had been broken for several decades, but we just didn’t know it. Falsehoods, fallacies, and the lack of fact-checking left news to the dogs. There was a tyrannical control scheme, where quality journalism existed, but it came from the top down. With anyone capable of broadcasting news — in any medium — it no longer from from the top; it comes from all around us. Big Media still has an important presence. Most bloggers comment on the well-researched articles presented by newspapers like the New York Times, and this prompts fact-checking, discussion threads, and corrections. If anything, the proliferation of bloggers and the democratization of broadcasting tools has leveled the field of news, stimulated creative and honest competition, and improved what news actually is. But people won’t read your article, your post, your tweet, unless it’s good journalism.

Tweeting & Instapapering

Yes, the immediacy of news — up to the minute, as it happens — isn’t necessary for everything. But it’s entirely useful for a number of other things, especially national crises, political movements, announcements, and — something we never had before — real-time happenings.

Massive delay waiting for a train? It happened this morning with the Blue Line. The first thing did was consult Twitter Search with a few queried keywords to see if anyone locally had any details on it. It’s easy to punch out a 140-character headline, and since everyone tends to look out for everyone else (and be the source of hot gossip or relevant news), I found my answer. And I saw it on my mobile device. It would be pointless to read it tomorrow. It actually probably wouldn’t be included in any newspaper tomorrow, because its only use was in real-time this morning. That kind of news didn’t even exist a few years ago.

So, Really

So while newspapers and periodicals will scramble over what direction to take their established formulas, the rest of us will continue to embrace the current way we consume news. Eventually, they’ll figure it out, but micropayments for individual articles is the stupidest way of going about it. Sure, the Times Reader is a terrific idea for computer users since it keeps the framework of a newspaper intact from its physical counterpart, but it requires a separate application that accesses the API of nytimes.com. The iPhone equivalent is nifty, but cumbersome and slow, and completely lacking interesting design.

I suppose none of this really matters to me, since I use Instapaper to rip the article text from the clustershit that constitutes so many news websites.