2020 vision: What's next for news

"As you can see, opportunity abounds."

A client looking to invest in media asked me earlier this month for advice on what might replace failing newspapers. My response? There are plenty of interesting ideas in play, but the first meaningful test won't come until a major American city loses its only metro daily. So wait.

That's because metro newspapers are taking up the market space in which the innovation he's looking for must occur. Newspapers may be failing, but most do a passable job of limiting serious competition in their markets. What succeeds in the shadow of an established metro, therefore, may not be what ultimately winds up contending for the market positions vacated by Old Media giants.

I think that's decent investment advice, but Clay Shirky's March 13th essay on the end of the newspaper era placed some urgency on the question “What Comes Next?” And since I'm a recovering newspaperman who's been studying and writing and speaking about that question off and on for the past four years, I figured now might be a good time to stake out some useful predictions about the future of American journalism to 2020.

I. AFTER THE FIRE (2009-2010)
To imagine what might happen next, it helps to think first about the likely short-term future for our established media institutions.

1. The future of newspapers is mixed. The unique web/print nationals (NYT, WaPo, WSJ) could rebound as early as 2010 (see item No. 2). Local papers that serve communities of up to 30k readers should remain marginally profitable in the short term and improve with the economy. But the hybrid beast known as the metro daily is in trouble, and most will not survive past 2010 in their traditional configurations.

2. Cutting back days. A few metros could succeed as intelligent world/national/local aggregators. Some might lurch along zombie-style as scaled-back copies of the original. But many will follow this pattern: A rejection of Associated Press membership, followed by a breaking up of the metro daily into several “local” papers that publish on different days. The website will be live every day and the presses will stay busy, but you'll only get “your” paper one to three times a week.

3. No more monopolies. The survivors will be those companies that learn to accept competitive annual profits in the 5 to 8 percent range. Upside-down companies that are leveraged against the expectation of 15 percent profits don't have a significant future.

4. Fewer people doing the same stories. Most of the newspaper jobs lost in 2009 will not return after the recession, and while most cities will generate enough revenue to support a professional press, watch for a wave of cooperative agreements between competing media companies and the popularization of the term “our broadcast partners.” Five competing reporters covering the same routine house fire is an inefficiency the new economics will not support.

5. Breaking up the business. Though I've not heard this discussed elsewhere, I won't be surprised if newspaper companies begin outsourcing either their newsgathering or their printing/distribution. Vertical integration now works only if you're properly capitalized, competently managed, and very good at each task. Most newspaper companies aren't.
   

II. TRENDS, SIGNALS & INFLUENCES (2009-2014)
There are quiet forces in play today that will profoundly influence the shape of our future -- and nobody knows what that shape will be. Pay attention to them – just don't expect these ideas to draw the big headlines during the short-term resolution of our current “crisis.”

1. Open Source wins. Open Source solutions and platforms will push proprietary systems to the brink simply because of the rate at which they adapt to change and innovation. Pay attention to the Big Media attempt to monetize this Open Source principle through the proliferation of news APIs, but don't expect it to succeed unless these APIs give developers and end-users more freedom.

2. Semweb foundations. Though the Semweb revolution is unlikely to break out in the public consciousness before 2011 (when it will likely be called Web 3.0), watch for companies and startups that build their news platforms on informatics-friendly systems. These are the companies that will grab the first sizable newsmedia profits from sources other than advertising and paid subscriptions. Smart outfits, no matter their funding or model, will redefine their primary product as semi-structured data, with narrative storytelling as a subset of each file.

3. Evolution matters. Rapid advancements in mobile technologies, wireless networks and user interfaces change user expectations and cost structures far more rapidly than adoption rates alone might indicate.

4. Advanced tools change everything. In October 2006, Eric Schmidt announced that Google would produce a real-time fact-checker for political statements within five years. Though many assumed the CEO was joking (and he might have been), a fact-checking informatics tool is likely well within the short-term capabilities of the search giant. Revolutionary advances do not produce incremental changes. If your sword is bronze and his sword is steel, you die.

5. Journalism includes explanation and memory. Sites that develop intelligent ways of curating old information could play a big role in the presentation of breaking news information.

III. THE KNOWN COMPETITORS (2009-2014)
My prediction? The next decade will see great diversity in terms of media funding, mission and identity. Ask not what business model is best: Ask what business model is best for your mission.

1. Newspaper industry pipedreams. Most of the ideas clustered around newspaper boardrooms and industry think-tanks today are unlikely to succeed in the existing environment. Paid access to web news, "premium” classified ads, customized papers, multimedia ads, e-editions, user-generated content, Web-based “TV” stations, bundling newspaper subscriptions into cable TV packages, etc. They'll fail for the same reason companies favor them: They re-iterate the “we-control-everything” status quo. And yes, that would apply to Dan Gillmor's "news cartel" idea, too (I say this sadly, as I've been a Gillmor fan for years). We're not adjusting. We're rebooting.
   

2. Web-only news sites. Local news is more expensive than state/national news on a per-reader basis, and Web advertising generates only about 15 percent the revenues of print. But newspaper advertising departments don't emphasize web sales and physical printing and distribution costs dwarf the cost of web publishing. There's already one great national example, plus this well-known “print-secondary” pub. But working local examples have existed for years, and the Silicon Valley sweatshops show no signs of fading.

3. Premium content. Sorry, newspaper executives – your general content doesn't qualify. But passionate or profitable niches (fantasy sports services, ESPN Insider, WSJ Online) offer proven successes, and there's at least one functioning example of my Intelligence Briefing Model.

4. Tabloid Bottomfeeders. You can't talk success stories without mentioning Drudge. Gawker Media, TMZ, etc., fall into similar categories. These sites, funded by basic web ads on big traffic, are likely to generate the first drafts of most 21^st century celebrity “news.”

5. Shared infrastructure. If you build an efficient means of selling, targeting and delivering advertisements, then all you need is the right content on which to place them. It's been done nationally. Can it be replicated locally? Perhaps more significantly: If you've got any kind of organizational infrastructure that can be shared with multiple content producers, you've got a business. Think of this as the business of content enabling, not content providing.

6. Crowdfunding. Crowdsourcing is exciting, but will crowd-funding be effective? We've seen some grant-funded experiments, but the concept is still in the testing stage..

7. Non-profit news. It's worked (at some level) for PBS and NPR, and there are new models for general and investigative news organizations funded by civic-minded institutions. Could this concept be extended to government-run media? Possibly... although I wouldn't look for that on the federal level any time soon.

8. Sponsorships and micro-sponsorships. Remember the days when attorneys couldn't advertise? To get around that, lawyers used to “sponsor” symphony orchestras to get their names mentioned in concert programs. Sponsorship-based advertising offers some sustainability advantages over traditional CPM/CPC ads and lets content producers spend more time producing than selling. Micro-sponsorship (asking users for some level of annual or monthly support, with or without some tangible benefit) is another interesting revenue source.

9. Volunteers. Call them amateurs, bloggers, citizen journalists, “pajamas-clad rabble,” whatever – much of the journalistic writing, editing and producing we'll see over the next 10 years will come from people who will not be paid directly or substantially for their work. Yes, this will affect the rates others will be paid, but no, this is neither bad for democracy nor civilization.

10. Interest-funded journalism. We already have plenty of examples of interests – economic, political, religious – contributing to journalism. Look for much more of it, in many more direct ways, and expect to see some of these relationships becoming extremely valuable. Why shouldn't the Sierra Club sponsor journalists? Why shouldn't the Republican Party subsidize particular bloggers? If the American Petroleum Institute can spend millions on PR, advertising and political lobbying, why shouldn't the Union of Concerned Scientists go beyond press releases and start funding, distributing and placing original content? Tired of trying to communicate your profession's expertise to mainstream media? Why not hire some communicators and bypass the mainstream press entirely?

11. Efficient copyright licensing. One irony of our nightmarish copyright “system” is that it serves to prevent the affordable, safe licensing of content. For instance: While everything on Xark is licensed via a CreativeCommons agreement that allows you to republish and remix what you find here for non-commerical purposes, that CC agreement doesn't offer an efficient way for commercial users to buy rights to my content. So long as most copyright acquisition is left to individual, open-ended negotiations between attorneys, I'm unlikely to be offered many small payments for commercial reuse of my content. Creating a system to accomplish that task without individual negotiations could be a breakthrough for the development of a functional information economy.

12. Direct subsidy. Mark Cuban wants a newspaper in Dallas because he understands its value to his product (The Dallas Mavericks). Are there businesses and entities besides professional sports teams that benefit from detailed and extensive mass-media attention? If so, it's easy enough to imagine coalitions forming to promote and sustain certain types of coverage. The fun part? Imagining the rules under which such a publication would operate.

13. Premium accounts. Chris Anderson's piece on the "free" economy does a good job of explaining how a minority of users who upgrade their accounts can pay the freight for the majority of freeloaders. For this to work, news outfits must offer something other than restricted news content. So what have you got to offer?

14. Give the pixels, sell the cotton. Know how webcomics creators get paid? Not by restricting access to their panels, but by selling t-shirts and posters.

15. Intelligent aggregation. Human aggregations of relevant content add value by improving the signal-to-noise ratio and scanning all relevant media, including coverage from bloggers, Tweeters, etc. The more diverse the mediascape, the greater the need for this service. Likely result? Many aggregators, each with a different combination of revenue sources and relationships to the content producers they cover.
    

IV. THE NEW EXOTICS (2010-2020)
Truly disruptive technologies tend to be the ones that change our fundamental ways of relating to the world. The competitors listed above are essentially analogs to the current media system, funded in ways that might relate more efficiently to the new media economy. But what's likely to change the game?

1. Information scalability. The No. 1 issue in modern communication is the superhuman rate of expansion in global information production. Mainstream media in 2009 attempt to deal with this problem by artificially limiting the “meaningful” sources of information and then applying “news judgment” to that limited stream. The engineering trick for journalism will be to create systems that scale the true global flow of data to levels that can be used comfortably by humans. This will be accomplished through information architecture, informatics, artificial intelligence, exotic findability structures, taxonomy/folksonomy systems, smart archival and curation techniques, plus multiple reputational and credibility scoring systems.

2. Machine readability. Modern mainstream media is geared to produce information that can be easily understood by humans. Limited metadata is then affixed to it during the publishing process, and these documents are then archived in ways that place many of them in the realm of the “dark web.” For information – and journalism – to become flexibly useful, this order will have to be reversed. This means journalists will produce machine-readable XML files first, with the human-readable narrative existing as a sub-set of that file. Why? Because machine-readability is not only more useful, but more profitable, because it allows the creation of...

3. Information products. A set of documents with analog descriptions of locations has no additional value. A dataset of every GPS coordinate, coded for relevance and subject, from every news “story” you produce in a year is immensely valuable for multiple purposes. My prediction? News organizations will give away their human-readable documents and sell their datasets, either directly to developers and researchers, or indirectly via their own informational products. Want to see an overlay with all the information related to a neighborhood before you buy a house? Will that be Visa or PayPal?

4. Mashups. Most information products will take the form of a mashup, but mashup development will not be limited to for-profit data comparisons. It's easy to imagine a graphic interface that would allow news-service subscribers to configure their own personalized mashups.

5. Automated data-enrichment. Manually marking-up data is slow, brain-numbing work that's prone to human error. The answer? Use automated analysis to generate much of the machine-readable metadata.

6. Data publishing. Machines don't read stories the way humans do, which means that optimizing content for automated information streams will require separate publishing formats for human- and machine-optimized data. This means we'll need protocols and XML formats, but the payoffs are significant.

7. Intelligent Agents. Machine readability via Semweb lets computers talk to each other in their own language. Once that foundation is in place, users should expect a rapid proliferation of free intelligent agents from various vendors, including news organizations. You'll program one agent to find you great travel deals, another to spot trends that could influence the value of your investments. Agents that learn from your choices could act as your romantic matchmakers, or do something as simple as selecting your morning headlines. Intelligent agents will be the primary way in which individual humans configure their interests and actions in the Web 3.0 world and beyond.

8. Predictive Intelligence. Modern journalism is based on the idea that impartially telling “both sides” of a story is more useful than “taking sides.” This approach has limited value in an information-rich environment where the goal is finding the signal in the noise. Credibility, therefore, is likely to move toward information sources that demonstrate their understanding of events and situations via predictive accuracy rather than claims of non-predictive objectivity.

9. Virtual businesses. Since the primary challenge for businesses in the 21^st century will be managing the pace of change, it no longer makes sense for most companies to be in the “business infrastructure” business. Consequently, we should expect that “the news business” will largely cease to exist as vertically integrated structures (a.k.a. “silos”). A likely replacement? Networks of sources, contributors and “competitors” who share much of the same contracted infrastructure. Do the three TV stations in your market each need to support a stand-alone engineering department? How many printing presses does your market need to support its competing print publications? And so on.

10. Value-added revenue. Traditional news media is in the business of serving sellers while pretending to be in the business of serving users. One way of realigning that system is to invent “news” organizations that fund their operations largely by getting paid for adding value to transactions on behalf of the buyer. By the way, I've been playing around with an idea for such a business in my spare time.

SO WHAT'S NEXT?
Journalists tend to think of the future in terms of their jobs, and from that perspective "What's next?" is another round of layoffs. Sorry, folks. Do the math.

But take a slightly longer view and "What's next?" is a decade of experimentation, opportunity and chaos. Some of the funding sources may appear exotic, but most of the “successful” business models (in this instance, "successful" means capable of sustaining a journalistic enterprise) from the coming decade will be little more than smart outfits that figure out how to accomplish their mission while keeping their costs down. Doing this will require a great deal of cooperation, plus a willingness to enter into relationships that our Old Media ancestors wouldn't consider.

Old Media executives don't recognize many of these alternatives as valid, but that's likely because they're looking at media business models from the perspective of “What can save my company?” But that's not the question we're asking..

And finally, I think we can safely expect that this diverse, open-source, networked-media future is going to be radically reorganized within the decade by the rise of information technologies that many news-media competitors will not be able to replicate. It is possible, if not likely, that many of the “successes” of 2012 will be swept away before 2020.

So when people ask me, “What should I do to prepare for the future?” I suggest they just wrap their brains around this idea: The current meltdown is just a warm-up act..

SUNDAY, MARCH 22, UPDATE: In case you missed it (and who am I kidding? Everybody missed it), here's my attempt to explain the demise of the newspaper industry last year in single-page cartoon format. Click on the image to see it full-size. - dc

Comments

[polit2k]

The Browser
the world in a window
http://www.browser.com

[Karl Pearson-Cater]

Thanks for putting this incredible outline together. You've really done your homework! Kudos.

[Dan Woog]

Superb analysis. And, of course, we're all reading it online, not in a newspaper. Because we want to follow all the links, respond quickly, and forward it far and wide. That says it all.

[Agricola]

Good stuff. Incidentally, Calais offers a feature called Tagaroo which works with WordPress blogs by analyzing the text and suggesting tags for metadata. Very nice. I've added it to my WP widgets collection. It works!

[Chuck Peters]

Dan -

Thank you so much. You have very capably given us a great overview of the intellectual framework, necessary activities and technical infrastructure needed to successfully pursue our C3-Complete Community Connection efforts.

Chuck

[PaulHyland]

Wow - blow my mind (or blog my mind)! Amazing compendium of ideas outlining the future of journalism, pulls no punches, no half-measures. We're in for a radical transformation of information access and distribution, and this business is at the vanguard (or in the cross hairs) if it can only move beyond the 20th century.

[Account Deleted]

This is one of the best, most-detailed, thoroughly supported predictive essays I've seen. Well done.

[Abe Abreu]

Dan, I've been thinking about this stuff so long it's pouring out my ears. My team and I have written multiple executive summaries on this, and we have not come close to this level of congruent thinking and communication. I plan to liberally lace your ideas into the next version of presentation I create - and credit you, of course.

I'd love to engage in some carbon-based communication, if you'd like.

Thanks so much,

Abe Abreu
CEO e-Me Ventures

[Tim]

This is brilliant - thank you!

[Dan]

One thing I've noticed over the years: The conversation ABOUT blogs, which used to take place in comments, has increasingly moved elsewhere. Here's a round-up of commentary on this post that I've collected from that dispersed conversation (re-Tweets and mentions without comment not listed):

@JamesEstrin: Another future of newspapers theory on Xark!- Pretty detailed -short version news survives

@blawtonnaa: RT - XARK's 2020 Vision: What's Next for News... Interesting thoughts on what will happen "after the fire (2009-10)

@Typist: smart, practical guesses

@markbriggs: Xark has a great forecast on the future

@gmarkham: Deep, interesting predictions on what's next for journalism/media from Dan at Xark

@Wildcat2030: "Xark!: 2020 vision: What's next for news" most inclusive a definite interesting

@ptaillandier: Very interesting tks

@jayrosen_nyu: What's next in news? ...you need vision, and links to the emergent. Dan Conover (@xarker) has both. Recommended.

@jny2: Want to take an exhilarating stroll down a still-futuristic memory lane? Check this out from @xarker... So old and so new!

@jny2: The shaky premise doing the work for @xarker: Finding signal is the process of finding true relevant facts among true irrelevant facts.

@jny2: Via @xarker, point IV. 8. http://bit.ly/twF1H (expand) As data become available, value of verification decreases, and value of analysis increases

@rhine: Nicely done, esp. the section on The New Exotics. 2, 3, 5, 6, all very good points.

@seanpowell: Good read

@tarheel360vr: @xarker ----> What's ahead for newsprint, new media & journalism. Bring hip boots. It's gonna be deep.

@johnrobinson: It's a great piece. Don't agree with all, but it is smart, well-sourced and most likely pretty accurate. Wish I had written it.

@KristineLowe: great summary on 1st skim thru, should make good wknd reading

@Chanders: @ckrewson curious as to how a relatively grounded in-the-biz guy like you reacts to the xark! 2020 post. Love? Hate? Useless, amazing?

@Chanders It's a good post. Generally I'm a fan of folks who try to figure out what happens next, because I want good journalism around.

Chuck Peters, from the highly innovative C3 program in Cedar Rapids: "For the best overview of the intellectual framework, activities and technical infrastructure needed to make C3 work, see Dan Conover’s wonderful piece at Xark on 2020 Vision."

Media consultant Mark Potts at "Recovering Journalist": "But trumping them both, in a much more constructive fashion, is an even smarter look forward by Dan Conover in the Xark blog at what may come to be, replete with an excellent laundry list of predictions...

"Maybe if we could harness all of the energy being spent arguing about whether professional journalists are still relevant (they are, but not in the ways we currently know them), whether newspapers are doomed (they are, at least the larger ones) and whether they can be replaced (yes, but the replacements will be much more complicated and sophisticated, as Conover hints), we could spend more time trying to bring the good ideas of Conover, Jeff Jarvis and others to life."

@cpetersia @xarker Trying to tell everyone I know about 2020 Vision! Great work that will help frame our discussions. Thanks, Chuck

@cpetersia Digesting great framework, activities and technology for C3, thanks to @xarker @annetteschulte @stevebuttry

@DIOpinions @xarker Indeed. Many of Kurzweil's predictions are extreme, but he seems very credible in the realm of electronic media.

@DIOpinions @xarker Your 2020 vision post (http://is.gd/oblK) seems to build on some of Kurzweil's ideas (http://is.gd/oltU).

@annetteschulte @xarker on the future of news biz: Successes of 2012 will be swept away by 2020.

Martin Langeveld at Harvard's Neiman Journalism Lab: "Thinking the thinkable: Dan Conover’s vision for the future of journalism":

"But the revolutionaries do have some pretty good ideas, which Shirky doesn’t explore. And Dan Conover at Xark! lays them out in a masterful post called '2020 vision: What’s next for news...'

"These are assumptions most of us have made, but Conover’s vision extends to what will shape journalism beyond the short term. Like Shirky, he says “nobody knows what that shape will be”, but he offers dozens of ideas on what the components will be. It would not be fair to summarize; you just have to go read it, but I’ll tell you what I liked particularly:" (Go read this excellent post to see what he's talking about)

This post was one of 12 referenced in Jay Rosen's "Flying Seminar" on the future of news, which he referenced on Twitter and others amplified. The links are collected
here.

Here's Chuck Taylor (Dude! I used to wear your shoes!) from the Seattle Post-Times:

"This thoroughly linked outline of what might happen as newspapers continue to decline in influence is one of the most-detailed and likely prescient things I've seen."

@renofish: "Links in Xark piece have some value" was my comment.

@marypathyland: @paulhyland Thanks for the great Xark link on journalism's future. Ex-journo, myself. P.S. Nice surname

@ljthornton: (fixed typo) Hearing this a lot today: newspaper ad depts don't push Web ads. See item III(2) in 2020 Vision:

@brianstelter"Some useful predictions about the future of American journalism to 2020:" http://bit.ly/RcNp (expand) (via )

@PMWoodford: Definitely worth a read

@wendyperrin: What's next for news, journalists, & media? Interesting predictions:

@stevebuttry: Long and loaded with insights about the future of media from @xarker: ecosystems, data, scalability, revenue streams.

@JillGeisler Check out Dan Conover's "Vision 2020: What's Next for News": #journ #journchat #journalism Well worth your time.

@eyeseast Xark looks a decade hence, makes some well-educated (and well linked) guesses about the media landscape

Apparently we're huge in Finland:

"Xark ryhmäblogin Dan Conover on koonnut yhteen tulevaisuuden uutismedian rakennuspalikoita, trendejä ja nousevia seuraavia luovan tuhon lähteitä. Ajatuksia herättävä kokonaisuus, joka ei yhdeltä istumalta sula historiaan. Tähän pitkään listaan - tässä lyhennettynä ja alkuperäisartikkelissa selitettynä - tullaan vielä palaamaan 2020 vision: What’s next for news (via niemanlab.org):"

Here's
Vancouver Sun Managing Editor Kirk LaPointe:

"...and now from the Xark group blog on what news might look like in 2020.

"The latter one is probably the most enjoyable of the lot, first because it's a bit of sci-fi and thus feels more escapist than the near-term reality of the other works, but mainly because it carries an optimistic and encouraging thread through it in delivering a framework for change.

"As you can see, plenty to review, and of all the pieces I've digested in this March Madness of journalism documents, this one has made me think the most."

@p2journalism: Conover on media: Foundations of 21st century journalism: Long and loaded with insights about the future of medi.. http://bit.ly/UiI7T

@saleemkhan: @nejsnave @doctorjones 1952EDT I thought about writing on news' future -- Daniel Conover's post seems like a fair summary

@ptleader: Take he time to read these thoughts on newspapers' future by Dan Conover

@adice: Some interesting thoughts on newspapers' future by Dan Conover

@Chanders: Important overview of OpenCalais talk at Columbia http://tinyurl.com/cs4foj (expand) -- relates to Xark 2020 and futility of paywall newspapers

John Reinan from The MinnPost:

"As one of my former bosses liked to say: 'Bring me solutions, not problems.' That's why, of all the scores of media ruminations and predictions I've read in the last couple of years, I like this piece by blogger Dan Conover.

"Conover lays out more potential scenarios than I could possibly imagine: from non-daily publishing and local media cooperatives on the simple end of the spectrum, to informatics and predictive intelligence on the more complex end."

@ckrewson: Your required weekend reading: News futures: What's next? An overview.

Oh, and in case you didn't make the connection, there are some GREAT Twitter follows in this list.

[Dan]

Here's Flip The Media:

"Dan Conover’s bold look ahead is the best I’ve seen. One emerging trend he spots is ‘predictive intelligence’."

[Dan]

I left out this great post by Professor Andy Cline:

Part of what is changing in the current media meltdown is the concept of credibility. The objective stance of journalism (arbiter of the known) evolved in the age of journalism as lecture. That age died. Lecture-based news products are now dying.

The new media have been teaching a generation that they have the right to talk back to and to enter into a conversation with journalism. Further, members of this new generation understand themselves to be content producers. They are, frankly, uninterested in media that do not allow them to talk back, produce, and consume as they please.

News as conversation will operate with radically different understandings of what constitutes credibility. And I’ve gotta tell ya, I think “predictive accuracy” is a damned good standard. What might other standards be? Hmmmm… an interesting area in which to think and make predictions.

[Coturnix]

I added my thoughts here...

[Lisa Williams]

Excellent post!

Late to the party here, but this is an excellent post. At Placeblogger, I track over 4,000 indy/local online community sites in the US; there are only 20k named places in the US according to the census, so it's not an isolated occurrence. I won't make any claims about their financial viability or whether or not they're a "replacement" for traditional newsrooms, but as someone famously said, quantity has a quality all its own.

Do you really believe in the Semantic Web/intelligent agents stuff, though? I've been hearing variants on that for nearly 20 years and I'm starting to wonder if it's like the flying car, or the nutritional pill that will replace eating -- an invention that for some reason never comes to pass.

Willing to be proven wrong, however; humans often overestimate change in the short term and underestimate it in the long term, and maybe agents/semweb stuff isn't a no-op, just a not-right-now.

[Dan]

Like you, I'm willing to be proven wrong. Daily. It's the only way I really learn anything valuable.

I think a large part of my semweb optimism is driven by three things: first, I think there's just too much wealth to be generated there by the companies that can afford to be in that development game; second, I think competitive fields are going to demand tools that scale to the actual flow of relevant information; and third, we've got a much better understanding of the informatics principles that would constitute the foundations.

Not so much discovery informatics, which is on the learning side (and very exciting), but just the notion of using simple XML as a way to create machine-readable environments. The intelligent agents become efficient only when they're working in that environment, and that environment gets built only when people see a financial return on structuring their information that way.

And to clarify: I think the bulk of the Web won't be Sembweb-optimized for a long, long time. If ever. So much of the web is simply expression and small-scale communication. But commerce is going to be increasingly conducted with tools, and most ideas tend to follow profitability.

People like us will become semwebby when the back-end guts become as ubiquitous as blogging platforms. And I think we'll want semweb publishing tools because it's the only thing that really makes Long Tail economics work for small content producers. If you want to make your living off of Kevin Kelly's "Thousand True Fans" idea, then you either need to be born a celebrity or find other ways of connecting to the dispersed group of people who would love you if they only knew about you.

Or you could be born with an enormous marketing budget. But I digress.

[Dan]

I found this comment on John Robinson's blog, but since it most concerns this post, I'm including it here. Disclosure: Rod Overton was a VP at Evening Post Digital when I was leaving Charleston.net to return to The P&C's features department. All these entities are owned by Evening Post Publishing.

rodney overton said:

I tried to read Dan Conover's manifesto but could not understand much of it -- and I consider myself to be on the cutting edge of innovation at media websites..

It would seem that Dan is covering so much territory (newspapers become open source?? what does that mean) and such a huge timeframe (2010-2020) (2009-2014) that what he wrote will never be considered wrong. (Heck, when does anyone except me on this blog ever say they are wrong in blog posts?)

I am not saying I disagree with any of it, but after running the most successful media website in the country, I have to say that simply focusing well on what works is likely to do more for you than committing Dan's list to memory.

I dont know if it is out of pride, stupidity or just laziness, but the improvements I have suggested on this site have never been taken up or executed. I still can't tell if anyone on the site is actually tasked with running breaking news for the organization each day. It's impossible to tell.

Good luck reading the tea leaves of Conover's manifesto. It's so easy to take your eye off the ball and focus on that (which despite focusing on the "future of news" never mentions TV stations role.. hmmmm...) instead of just doing things that you are supposed to be doing RIGHT. (Just look at where Lex's big blogging escapade got you four-five years later -- NOWHERE)

I suggest you start reading Jeff Jarvis' blog.

A recent post suggests that newspapers have now given up on trying to make an orderly transition to digital -- mainly by ignoring people like me for the last 10 years to instead do many stupid things half-assed -- and will just fail outright. Then, something will emerge from those ashes.

It's just too bad that there are smart people who could actually make a difference -- instead unbelievably ill-informed people keep writing manifestos and other unbelievably stupid people keep thinking they are the gospel and keep doing dumb things.

Answer me this JR: If you read Conover's manifesto and believe it to be somewhat possible, why not try to actually AVOID parts of it? (One section is "after the fire" -- why not avoid the fire in the first place?)

It seems every single newspaper I see is STILL in the mode of doing just as little change as possible hoping in the back of their mind that they can keep things just as they were in 1990 -- still praying that nothing will really change and at the last second it will all just "be OK"

That scenario is nowhere in Conover's post, but it is what all of you are doing RIGHT NOW.

Conversely, I have talked to many TV stations recently and even the smaller ones eagerly now agree that they will do ANYTHING possible to stay alive. One major TV station in Colorado has tasked the web managing editor with re-writing most jobs to have key tasks for the web (and I mean actually performing tasks on the WEBSITE, not just creating stuff and having the web people post it.)

So, why are you still seeming to say "the fire" is inevitable and not really making the key changes that are necessary?

I'm finding it hard to feel sorry for you..

Posted on March 29, 2009 5:37 PM

[Account Deleted]

Like one poster, I find this a dizzying amount of information, though as far as I understand it, it's great.

And it's *certainly* quite thorough -- exhaustively so!

[Dan]

Sorry. I get carried away sometimes.

[TvMissionary]

Open source. Yes. Look for massive aggregation. One player (Google) could take it all and macrotarget journalistic content into millions of customized daily editions a day.

[Maureen Ogle]

Fascinating! (How the heck did I miss this the first time around??) One of the best commentaries on the subject yet.