It’s comment and opinion, not news, that really adds value to newspapers – but not just that
Posted: March 21st, 2010NSFW: Jimmy Wales Wants Me Dead (The Neutrality Of This Article Is Disputed): “The battle to force people to pay for general news, then, is lost. Likewise, thanks to micro-aggregators like Techmeme and macro-aggregators like Google News, the fight to maintain reader loyalty through news reporting is finished too. Sure, some people may still cling to the BBC or the New York Times out of habit, but the trend towards decentralisation – with readers choosing their news source on a story-by-story basis – is inexorable.”
I’ve been posting links to a lot of stories about the future of news publications and ads and commenting on them recently. While this article is a reply to something Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia said, with a misleading title designed for shock, the article is really about making the case that newspapers will have to “fill their pages with nothing but highly paid opinion columnists” to survive.
I don’t know if Carr (the author) is entirely correct but I do strongly believe that publications need to start thinking about adding value to what they publish. Opinion is a source of value. So is content presentation (hence the link to Viv magazine’s ipad demo at the start of the previous paragraph). But so is “commodity” (e.g. allowing downloads in PDF format, printing, instapapper friendly pages, etc) and “filtering”. The overwhelming amount of information available is just too much for anyone to keep up with without effort. Outsourcing that effort is something I believe has to happen on a much better scale. In essence, that’s what aggregators such as slashdot, digg, reddit and google news do. But they’re doing this on a highly unpersonalized way that fails to capture the difference between individual news reading habits, what interests us (which can even change if the same individual is reading during the week or the weekend).
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