BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis has posted an interesting look at the future of news, Journalists: Where do you add value?:

Journalism can’t afford repetition and production anymore.

Every minute of a journalist’s time will need to go to adding unique value to the news ecosystem: reporting, curating, organizing. This efficiency is necessitated by the reduction of resources. But it is also a product of the link and search economy: The only way to stand out is to add unique value and quality.

My advice in the past has been: If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And: Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.

The question every journalist must ask is: Am I adding value?

Jarvis raises an issue that’s very important, not just to journalists, but to anyone involved in media.

When blogging, podcasting and video podcasting emerged, there were a lot of people who saw them as get rich quick opportunities. The idea was that, since blogging/podcasting/video podcasting made it easy to publish and share media with the world, they would open up a world of opportunity.

These people only saw half the picture, though.

New media does open up a world of opportunity – but it also opens up a world of competition.

Suddenly, everyone is blogging, podcasting, video podcasting, sharing photos and microblogging.

Every local paper in the US is now competing with every other paper in the US, every other paper in the world, every blogger, every podcaster, vlogger and even Twitter for attention. This competition has resulted in papers around the US shutting their doors.

Whether you’re creating old media or new media, you can look forward to your work becoming less and less valuable, as more and more content gets shoveled onto the Net. The only way to fight this trend, as Jarvis suggests, is to create something that’s really unique.

For some, this may mean original reporting and interviews. For others, it may be filtering information to create a “curated” information portal. For others, it may be offering a unique perspective on the news.

Jarvis sums up his thoughts like this: “Do what you do best and link to the rest. The link economy is ruthless in judging value.”

What do you think? In this day and age, what makes news have value?

Image: Zarko Drincic

TIME Magazine’s former managing editor, Walter Isaacson, writes in the current issue of Time magazine, that newspapers (and, by extension, newsmagazines, too) are in crisis, even though readership is up significantly.

Huh? Why this disconnect?

“Fewer of these consumers are paying,” he says. “Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news.”

Isaacson conjures the ghost of Time magazine co-founder Henry Luce, who considered “morally abhorrent” those freebie news publications that relied on advertising revenue as its sole funding source. Continues Isaacson (channeling the spirit of Luce),

“good journalism required that a publication’s primary duty be to its readers, not to its advertisers. In an advertising-only revenue model, the incentive is perverse.

It is also self-defeating, because eventually you will weaken your bond with your readers if you do not feel directly dependent on them for your revenue. “

Isaacson says the business model of publishing news online at no cost to readers (content supported by ads) “doesn’t make sense.”

In the olden golden days of publishing, he explains, publishers had a three-sided revenue base:

• newsstand purchases,
• reader subscriptions,
• and advertising revenues.

The last several years have seen newsstand purchases and subscriptions dwindle. A boom in Internet advertising in recent years seemed initially to make up for the lack. But, as Internet ad revenues declined for news outlets in the last quarter of 2008, that one remaining healthy funding source – advertising – took on an unhealthy pallor.

Isaacson, now CEO of the Aspen Institute, calls for news organizations to return to the “bold, old” business model of “getting paid by users for the services they provide and the journalism they produce.”

This echoes what we saw earlier this week, when the New York Times’ executive editor Bill Keller discussed the Times’ consideration of micropayments, charging for premium online content, and other moneymaking schemes.

However, few news organizations are succeeding with the pay-for-online-access revenue model. Consumers of media (whether it is news or entertainment or anything else) have grown to expect free, unfettered access to content. We time-shift our television watching, gather news from sources around the world, and seek out entertainment, and expect to do this for free.

Certainly, Isaacson and Keller are right in this respect: well-reported, well-researched journalism is valuable. Creators and publishers of that news content need to be rewarded for their labors and expertise.

Is a strictly ad-supported media universe “morally abhorrent”? If this revenue model is abhorrent (or, in a sagging global economy, unworkable), how else do news organizations fund the work they do?

Photo: Lewis W. Hine, 1910, Library of Congress via bobster1985

YouTube has announced two developments: the expansion of their HD player and a test of three new landing pages.

Here are the details of the announcement:

HD on YouTube

Starting today, if you click the “watch in HD” option below any HD-enabled video, the video will automatically play in widescreen – so you can find out where the hell Matt is in glorious HD, if you so wish. As part of this launch, we have created an HD Videos area where you can browse videos uploaded in the HD format. In anticipation of your questions – including how to encode your videos to take advantage of this new feature and how to avoid the dreaded “windowboxing” – we have prepared an FAQ in the Help Center. Hopefully you’ll find any technical information you need there, but feel free to post follow-up questions to the YouTube Community Help Forums.

New Video Landing Pages

News, music and movies are huge categories on YouTube and as a result it can sometimes be tough to find exactly what you’re hoping to watch. In a bid to smooth your path to the perfect video, we are testing three new video landing pages: youtube.com/news, youtube.com/music, and youtube.com/movies. The news page will be populated with breaking stories from around the world as well as news drawn from the Google News service; music will feature rising videos alongside playlists dedicated to different genres; movies will showcase some of the most popular short and full-length movies on YouTube today. We’ll keep a close eye on how these pages perform with a view to rolling them out in other categories.

These may not seem like major announcements – but they position YouTube to be the destination site for news, music and movies.

As YouTube pushes high-quality mainstream videos via these new landing pages, though, will user-generated video be pushed to the side?

CBS Interactive, a division of old-media television network CBS, announded yesterday the debut of MOBLOGIC, a new daily web video show.

MOBLOGIC, which begins airing episodes today, paints itself as offering “news and politics with attitude.” The show will be hosted by Lindsay Campbell, the former host of video podcast Wallstrip (which started out as an independently-produced show, but is now also owned by CBS). The Moblogic website says the show will “put the news cycle in perspective by talking to ordinary people on the street.”

Rather than trying to reach out to new media consumers by repackaging mainstream content on the web, CBS Interactive is making clever use of the experience and expertise of podcasters in the creation and production of the show, engaging the writing and production talents of Adam Elend and Jeff Marks, who also currently work on Wallstrip.

The introductory video clip made us feel as though they’re either trying to be very cutesy-clever, or they don’t really know what it is they want to be or do. We’ll check back next week to see how that goes.

A launch party is being held tomorrow in Austin, Texas at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival.

Blog and podcast pioneer Dave Winer has an interesting take on the future of news:

He describes a hypothetical news service where it’s easy to customize the content so that you get the news and information that you’re interested in. By selecting or deselecting checkboxes, you’d determine what news would show up on the page.

In other words – if you’re sick of headlines about Anna Nicole Smith’s post-mortem troubles, you could de-select the Anna Nicole Smith checkbox, and you wouldn’t see any more of her.

Winer’s idea for a customizable news page isn’t particularly new – just about every Internet news service offers some level of customization and collaborative filtering. But Winer’s right that the future of news needs to be easier to customize, and just plain smarter.

The Future Of News

Winer doesn’t go far enough, though. In this day and age, a progressive news service needs to be:

• Customizable – you should be able to easily add or subtract entire sections, a la Google News
• Personalized – There should be a thumbs-up/thumbs-down option for each story, so that you can give the system feedback on whether or not you’re interested in an article. Give a couple Anna Nicole Smith articles the thumbs-down, and no more stories about who fathered Dannielynn.
• User-driven – Digg has showed that there’s something to be learned from the thousands of other people that use news services. Any modern news service needs to incorporate some form of collaborative filtering to help uncover niche news that may actually have broad interest.
• Respectful of your attention – One of the reasons that Google’s approach to Web advertising has been so successful is that it respects your attention. AdSense takes into account the content of the page it is on and the context of what readers actually click on and uses this information to display the ad that it thinks you’re most likely to be interested in. While this system is far from perfect, it’s blows away most other approaches to advertising. News systems need to be smart enough to show you the content and the ads that you’re likely to be interested in and the ads.
• Source-agnostic – most news systems do a poor job of integrating content from blogs, podcasts and video podcasts. Smart people want to read about the things they are interested, regardless of the news source. Instead of having to use a news site and a blog search and and iTunes to get information from various types of sources, the news service should be intelligent enough to bubble up good content from all sources.
• Multi-platform – an intelligent advertising system needs to be multi-platform and multimedia. People still want to read newspapers – just not newspapers that use yesterday’s technology. News organizations need to harvest information from the activity of users at their websites to create a new form of newspaper that is user-driven, customizable, personalized, source-agnostic and paid for by advertising that serves your needs. The same approach will be applied to television or video news, too.

This is a tremendous opportunity for news organizations that have the resources to combine traditional news gathering with technologies like on-demand printing and video, informed with information gathered from their online presence.

The Internet audience is ready for news our way – with or without Anna Nicole Smith – we’ve got money to spend – and we want it now.