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Signal and Noise

March 19, 2011 on 7:52 am | In IdBlog, Spin, Stuff | Add a Comment

In 2010, more Americans got their news from the net than from newspapers, according to the State of the News Media Report 2011, recently released by the Pew Trust. “The internet now trails only television among American adults as a destination for news, and the trend line shows the gap closing,” the report stated.

The study also identifies the structural changes underlying this shift in news consumption. “In the 20th century, the news media thrived by being the intermediary others needed to reach customers. In the 21st, increasingly there is a new intermediary: Software programmers, content aggregators and device makers control access to the public. The news industry, late to adapt and culturally more tied to content creation than engineering, finds itself more a follower than leader shaping its business.”  Therefore, it’s not surprising that online ad revenue also exceeded ad revenue earned by newspapers in 2010.

Readers have certainly seen a change in the quality of news in the past decade and a half. Because the tools used to collect and disseminate information have become so inexpensive, anybody can be a reporter and a publisher. Consequently, there’s a lot more “content” available, but less actual news. At the same time, old media sources like big metro papers, are engaged in a race to the bottom as they cut costs to adapt to the new business model. In between are a lot of so-called news organizations — AOL, Demand Media, Fox News — that are predicated on the idea that content must be cheap to be profitable.

The result is that the signal has been flooded with noise. Actual news has been replaced with conjecture, opinion and amateur reporting. A related effect of this shift in the business of news is that there is no longer a sense of consensual reality. As traditional media outlets chase more narrowly defined audiences, the idea of a “mainstream view”, or center, has vanished.

New technologies have always changed the way people learn and think. The printing press, steamships, the telegraph, radio and television have all caused upheavals in the news business. The internet is no different. Soon, I hope, people will find methods and sources to pull meaning from this muddle of information.

Here are a few predictions (more baseless opinion) about the shape of the news business in the future. Old media, newspapers and television, will continue to shrink budgets and cut staff until they arrive at a profitable business model — or fold. Radio is the exception to this, probably because radio’s cost of production is already low, but also because its mode of delivery is highly portable and convenient for news consumers.

The news field will become more crowded as amateurs pile in and various crowd-source schemes are tried and discarded. The successful model will probably be programmatic: an algorithm or faceted filter that pulls from dozens of live feeds to render a digest of current events. Google News is already doing something like this with their News For You filter.

The authoritative, professional sources of news that emerge will either be subsidized or collectivized. Subsidized news has been around a long time. The BBC and the CBC are leading examples. Newer players, like Al Jazeera, will thrive with this model too. Collectivized news,  like the Associated Press and Reuters, will become more dominant as news outlets pool resources to get quality reporting. Citizen collectives like Democracy Now, Common Dreams and Wikileaks will also become more prominent.

And, finally, The New York Times’ new online subscription fees won’t add much to the company’s revenue. Although the method of implementing the new paywall is savvy, the price point is too high. At $35 a month for an all-access digital subscription, the NYT won’t see many non-institutional subscribers. For more info on that see nytimes.com/access.