The digital divide just got much deeper. This disruptive update comes from a recent conference in Texas that underlined how fast the information environment is changing abroad.
For a start, and similar to the way TV became the killer attraction for audiences in the old media world, video is now conquering the web where there is a critical mass of broadband users.
Second, and from a journalistic point of view, there is what media pundit Jeff Jarvis calls a ”new architecture of news in the age of links”. His speech, plus those of others, showed how the standing of traditional journalism within ever-widening internet content options is shrinking by the second.
For old media, the magnitude of changes equates to Galileo pointing out that the universe doesn’t revolve around the Earth. Traditional media are being rapidly decentred as the key source of public information. Their historic status recedes each moment a new source for information, or an extra platform for advertising, joins the avalanche of activity already in cyberspace.
Take Twitter — a newish software that cross-communicates content between email, instant messaging and cellphones. Apart from enabling micro-posts online, like those of campaigning United States Senator John Edwards, the technology is yet another option to absorb the attention of those who might otherwise have spent time with old media.
Slowly, newspapers in the US are awakening to what is happening. Speakers from the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today told how formerly separated print and online news teams are now being co-located and even merged.
But these are micro-advances in a broader info-scape whose scale is inexorably overshadowing and overwhelming the mission of old media — even those who play in the online jungle.
Speaker Jean-Francois Fogel of Le Monde interactif gave the Texas conference a front-line report from what he dubbed the web’s ongoing ”war” of innovations. ”The press has lost all the battles so far — blogs are now done mostly outside of us, photographs are posted on Flickr, video is on YouTube, social networking on Myspace, classifieds through Craigslist.”
The verdict: newspapers are losing in digital land to all kinds of new companies.
Fogel could have added that old media in general have also lost out on information search: Google continues to unbundle their economics — taking their content, building audiences around this and giving advertisers perfect targeting. News aggregators and customisable website pages are, meanwhile, replacing the editorial selection role of the erstwhile gatekeepers.
The result of all this is enormous economic pressure on old media companies. In the US, their websites currently contribute only about one-10th of revenue to the overall business. The stream is growing fast — while traditional broadcast and newspaper models are hastening to collapse.
The big question is whether gains in online will be enough to subsidise old media over the transitional period. This prospect is critical for the journalism that these earlier media forms sustain and which today still contribute the bulk of professional newsgathering to the info-scape.
Given the predominant advertising model of supporting online content, the issue is how journalism online can generate visitor traffic in an environment that has more and more competing attractions. What the Texas conference revealed is a range of reasons why people might still visit websites with journalism:
- One (humbling) reason is if other sites in cyberspace point to them. Massive traffic for a slide show at the Washington Post has been simply because gossipmonger Matt Drudge’s website has linked to it. (Talk about no longer being the centre of the universe!)
- For a journalism company like Mediastorm.org, 35% of traffic is by RSS feeds — a technology that alerts interested parties to new content as it goes online.
- People also visit because they want to contribute content or commentary — and that hangs on whether there are tools to do so. Le Monde interactif gets 5 000 comments a day from readers; El PaÃÂÂs online has 18 000 daily interactions from its users.
This ”user-generated content” reflects people’s desire to communicate their news and views, but interestingly, there is also great interest in just following conversation. Comments and debate is the second-most-popular area for visitors at Colombian media website Semana.com.
By contrast, much traditional media (even online) are still stuck in the mode of treating people as only consumers of content.
The irony is that user entries also create more online content that can be inventoried for advertising, as Ken Riddick of Star Tribune Interactive pointed out in Texas. Web manager Julie Weber linked this to ”the long tail of the internet” theory — the ability to capitalise on the specialised audiences and micro-advertising around incidental content such as pets or hunting.
Yet, despite all this potential, the response by many old media has been risk averse to the revolution taking place. They still see the web as incremental to what they do, rather than comprehend how the technology is totally transforming the information universe.
For example, the conference heard that two British papers have only reluctantly let their journalists run blogs. The Telegraph now has 37 of these, while the Times has 39. In one case, the leadership thought the ”fad” needed to be pandered to, and so staff were asked to volunteer.
Comments researcher Alfred Hermida: ”This shows that the blogs are not yet taken seriously, that there is no sense that they could take over.” Talking in Texas, he contrasted the experience to a TV newsroom where editors would never casually ask who wanted to anchor the evening show.
There’s even more that much old media also haven’t yet grasped:
- The blogging-style practice where, instead of acting as a centralised publisher, the trend is to republish on other sites as much as possible (using technologies termed widgets). (Exception: the BBC is at the forefront of this).
- The way that traditional mass media are losing their monopoly on providing comment and analysis. Those experts who were called on for this in the past are now increasingly doing their own thing via the inter-linked blogosphere.
- Media reviews and recommendations are being supplanted by the social networking of Web 2.0 where online communities rate the best music, movies and much more.
- The fact that blogging — with its free keyword tags, generosity of hyperlinks and commentability — is providing a far richer informational experience than most mass-media sites.
All this leaves traditional media — whether online or not — with newsgathering, that is, reportage, as about the only thing left that is unique to them. If there is any asset they have that can draw audiences online, it is this.
Jarvis urges media to focus accordingly — ”let’s do what we do best and link to the rest”. He may be right. A study released at the Texas conference showed that while hyperlocal community sites by citizen journalists are buzzing with debate and contributions, there is little fresh or comprehensive reporting on them.
Other speakers noted, however, that even reportage is changing with the new technologies, such as:
- Newsassignment.net where the public donates funds and contributes news assignment ideas. Professional and amateur journalists then bid to do the job under professional editors. USA Today, for one, is now also experimenting with what are called ”pro-am” journalism projects.
- The Fort Myers News Press in Florida uses ”crowd sourcing” to do investigative journalism — such as successfully soliciting site users’ tips, documents and experiences on a story about exorbitant charges for sewage infrastructure.
How reportage, a costly business however it’s configured, can survive on the basis of online economics is still in an experimental stage. Meanwhile, to use Borat’s phrase, what are the cultural learnings from all this?
A time will certainly come when South Africans’ cellphones are WiMAX internet enabled, include MP3 players to run podcasts and boast decent screen sizes for digital television. It will be then that user contributions and competition from other content options will put us in the fast lane.
Our media companies still have time to prepare and to invest in their reportage capacities. But will they?