Five Thoughts on the Future of Journalism

Last night, a Twitter conversation between David Armano (SVP of Edelman Digital), Brian Morrissey (digital editor at AdWeek) and me about the disparity between mainstream media and the social web got me thinking about the future of journalism. Our conversation was sparked by a recent report conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism (via this blog post).

The report itself is a good one, however, there was one point that stuck in my craw a little bit (and I think David's as well):

While social media players espouse a different agenda than the mainstream media, blogs still heavily rely on the traditional press -- and primarily just a few outlets within that -- for their information. More than 99% of the stories linked to in blogs came from legacy outlets such as newspapers and broadcast networks. And just four -- the BBC, CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post accounted for fully 80% of all links.

While I don't disagree at all with the concept that social media relies heavily on the same four legacy outlets for source material, this doesn't mean that social/new media can't or won't survive without these traditional media outlets. 

What I will concede is that IF traditional media were to die -- something I don't think will ever happen -- we would fair just fine. The biggest shift in my mind would be a need for better filters that would help us collectively sort through the wheat and chaff. This likely is some combination of human curation and a variety of technologies relying on collaborative filtering and natural language search.

With that as a backdrop, here are my five thoughts on the future of journalism.

1. As traditional advertising dollars continue to shrink, so too will budgets that support traditional advertising. Hopefully this means that rags like the New York Post go away and that gems like NPR and the Christian Science Monitor rise to the top via user support and innovative new sponsorship opportunties.
2. Following up on an earlier thought, as social media news sources grow and traditional ones shrink, there will be an ever increasing need for curation and technology to help us find and filter. Think Alltop.com with less Guy Kawasaki.
3. Traditional outlets will do themselves a favor by keeping an eye on the likes of The Austin Statesmen (h/t to Rob Quigley for the work he's leading there),  AdWeek's AdFreak co-created by Mr. Morrissey and Boston.com with its clever use of hashtagged content, regularly updated blogs and complementary video footage.
4. The need for PR firms and departments to brief/pitch top podcasters, bloggers, video bloggers and micro bloggers will continue to increase. Not saying this is a real "aha" but as a the reliance on the top news bloggers as primary source of information grows bigger, so too will a need to keep these influencers in the loop.
5. Only a few select organizations will ever be able to charge for their content irrespective of whether or not micropayments ever catch on.

I'm quite sure I'm missing a bunch of hot topics here but this should get some of the creative juices flowing. Where do you see the future of journalism headed? Join the conversation in the comments below.

Lifestreaming with Steve Rubel at BlogWorldExpo

Some "life-streamed" notes from Steve Rubel, SVP at Edelman. from the BlogWorld Expo. He's talking about the evolution of the "inbox" e.g. e-mail, sms, IM, Twitter, FourSquare. [Note: you get a sense that this session is of high value given the fact that Louis Gray, David Armano, Shell Holtz, David Thomas and Jason Falls to name a few "big brains" are in the room taking copious notes.]

• Steve's off to a good start telling us to "avoid the shiny object syndrome" and focus on the big trends (vs. the individual tools).
• Businesses need to think about how they can engage in real time
• All sites in next 5 years need social capabilities or will become irrelevant
• Web sites in general will become less relevant.
• People are starting to practice "selective ignorance." Screening out more and more news.
• People are also becoming media agnostic. Just want the news that they want and many times will hear it from friends.
• 111 is the average number of domains an average person in the U.S. visits in a month
• On average, 2,500 web pages visited/month
• We are becoming addicted to short-form content (this helped Twitter - centralized and short form)
• Jakob Nielsen (usability guru) found the people read 20% of web pages
• People need to hear things 3-5 times before they can actually digest them

Interesting because Steve has blogged for a long time and used to do 3-5 posts/day (every day for 3 1/2 years). Once Twitter came out, that evolved to 3-5 times/week. Then with FriendFeed, that continued to evolve. He got to the point where he felt like his blog was irrelevant. And then Posterous came along. The beauty is that everything is "e-mailable" and could put it content in a centralized place but could also get cross-posted in the respective places (like Twitter or Flickr) if he wants. [Note: I signed up for Posterous a few months ago but haven't done a whole lot other than use it for inbound.]

Cool tip. Steve uses a tool called Simply Tweet and anything that he writes that is over 140 characters gets posted on Posterous with a link cross-posted on Twitter.

Big question? What does this mean for brands and how do they cope with all the streams. Steve's three recommendations are:

• You have to be ubiquitous
• Steve uses Posterous to do this
• Create "hub and spoke" strategy: build "embassies" everywhere blog, Facebook, Twitter
• Ford has done a nice job of this. You can all their content in a centralized place OR you can get it out on the individual social networks
• Muliplicity and diversity
• Obama campaign uses different sites/formats to tell stories different ways at different times (Flickr, Youtube, blogs)
• Discoverability and visibility
• Traditional PR has been the process of creating "rain" and trying to get people "wet."
• Ironically, people have going to the beach to "get wet" (Google) for several years now
• Goal is to get people to "pull" your content vs. always pushing content
• Life stream is great because it's highly discoverable
• Creating "discoverable" content makes for great SEO juice

All in all, great content. It's rare that I learn a whole lot at events like these (mainly because Twitter is such a great fountain of information) but this was a great session that now has me thinking. Thanks Steve!

post script: a few reasons why Steve loves Posterous:

• content is all exportable (this is huge)
• customer service is phenomenal
• allow him to overlay it with his own domain - http://steverubel.com
• because he e-mails everything in from gmail, he has a backup for everything on gmail.