Newer news

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, news, social trends

What happened to these? Gone the way of the buggy whip, for sure! You can still buy a buggy whip, particularly in Amish country, and you can still obtain a Mergenthaler Linotype, if you want to produce printed text the way it was done from 1886 to about 1975. But technology has advanced, and few people alive today have even seen one of these, though our libraries are full of older books and other materials that were typeset on them.

One of my father's first jobs, as a teenager, was to hand-set the headlines for a newspaper, in the compositor's corner, where the rest of the room was full of Linotype operators. My first paying work was as a paperboy, from age 11 to 15, when I could get a "real" job. We paperboys (and a girl or two) got the chance to visit the newspaper production floor yearly to Ooh and Aah over the machines. In the 1950s, Linotypes and roll/web presses still ruled.

Now we can all publish at will, using MS Word or Corel Wordperfect or OpenOffice Writer and a laser printer or inkjet printer. Or we can do virtual publishing, like blogging, tweeting, or filling our Facebook Wall with our thoughts. It may not be long before lithographic offset printing is completely superseded. If you take a daily newspaper, it is still printed on a roll/web press, though the ink plates are produced by phototypesetting machinery. But there aren't any 11-year-old paper carriers any more; they've joined the Dodo.

What about this guy? Also going the way of the buggy whip, or of the Dodo? Not so fast! News is changing, and changing fast, but we still need someone to gather it and write it up. There will probably always be a place for the professional journalist, but they are getting competition from the amateurs, and the thought of journalism as a "day job" is definitely on the way out, even though the profession itself remains with us.

Journalistic trends and technology's impact on the news form the core of Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get by Ken Doctor. The author has formulated his thesis as twelve "laws"; as listed on the back cover of the book:

1. In the age of Darwinian content, you are your own editor
2. The Digital Dozen will dominate
3. Local: Remap and reload
4. The old news world is gone—get over it
5. The Great Gathering; or, the fine art of using other people's content
6. It's a pro-am world
7. Reporters become bloggers
8. Itch the Niche
9. Apply the 10 percent rule
10. Media learn how to market, marketers learn how to make the most of media
11. For journalists' jobs, it's back to the future
12. Mind the gaps

I don't propose to detail these twelve Laws; that's the author's job, after all! But three key terms stand out: Darwinian content, the Niche, and the Gig model (from the 11^th Law).

First, Darwinian content: The news has escaped the newsroom, and is all over the Web. Stewart Brand once made complementary statements: "Information wants to be free" and "Information wants to be expensive". Based on the proverb that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead, once information is produced and distributed to a few, it is bound to get out to all. On the other hand, producing information is not free. If it takes someone a couple of hours to gather the material for a short news item, and another hour to type it up and proofread it (something not many will do), who is going to pay a few hundred dollars for the time spent? Bloggers like me write because we love to write, and enjoy the interaction from readers, in the form of comments and e-mails. But I have a day job to pay my bills. If I had to live from my writing, I'd firstly monetize my blog, and you'd begin seeing banner ads or pop-ups, so I could get click-through revenue. I'd do a few other things differently also, such as write freelance material for magazines.

But someone, paid or not, wrote 72,000 news articles containing the word "recession" in the past hour, according to Google News, which I just checked a few minutes ago. Making the same search at Yahoo News yields only 137 articles, but they have been curated and edited, rather than aggregated by a search algorithm. Even 137 is an overwhelming number. No matter how a certain four or five stories make their way to the top of Google or Yahoo's list, those are all I am likely to read. On average, among avid readers such as myself, that is all anybody is going to read. The rest are "selected against", in Darwinian terms, and their ideas, worthy or not, die a-borning.

Many of those articles may be from "citizen reporters" (the Pro-Am model), but at least some of them were written for pay. They are free to me because some advertisers are hoping I'll click on their ads, which tightly surround the list of search results, and maybe buy their stuff.

So if I can get all of this stuff free, why do I still subscribe to the daily newspaper? To tell the truth, I spend more time on the daily crossword, Sudoku and cryptogram than I do reading. But I do read, and I read mostly from the Local section. My wife, not a puzzle worker, spends about an hour a day, and reads mostly national and world news from the A section. She tells me what she finds interesting there, so I let her read first.

This brings us to local reporting and special interest reporting. Back at Google News, if I enter "recession" and the city where I live, this more focused search brings back just eight articles written in the past week (and none for today, yet). Now that I can read. Half of these articles, or edited portions, are likely to wind up in the newspaper, where I'll read them anyway. So focused content is of interest to me, such that I pay for it. This is likely to continue, which is what "Itch the Niche" is all about. If the Google Search robot has been gathering my searches (I use three computers, so it is harder for them), it knows my interests by now, and can target news stories to me. Or I can be nice and go to the Google News Agent and get articles e-mailed to me about search items of interest to me (I wonder if they'll ever figure out the Hong Kong connection, though). By the way, "niche" does not rhyme with "itch", though the author seems to think it does. It rhymes with "wish". But I guess the alliteration was too good to pass up.

Finally, as the giant news operations have been breaking up, journalists have been returning to the 1880's model of working as a stringer, doing all freelance reporting. This is the Darwinian model of the journalism job market. How is an honest reporter to make a buck? The best ones are getting richer than if they'd kept their day job, but most of them are scraping by while doing their own marketing, which takes time away from writing. They are also blogging and tweeting up a storm. The biggest category of blogs has always been News or Current Events (depending on which blog aggregator you look at).

We are part way (probably much less than halfway) through a transition, but the current shake-out is this:

• Tweets yield the most immediate news.
• Blogs are next with more content and sometimes decent writing.
• News aggregation sites archive either the best (AP and Yahoo, for example) or nearly everything (Google, the Hoover vacuum of content), in case we missed a story on Day 1.
• By the time a story hits newsprint or the radio or TV, it is pretty old news in today's culture.

So there you have it. The news scene is today's news, and will be for some time to come. Maybe micropay models will one day allow journalists to make a more steady buck again. For now, they're suffering, along with a lot of out-of-work editors. "Daily" papers come three times a week some places. In another generation, only a few old fogies like me will still enjoy the feel of a paper news sheet or printed book; everyone else will have Kindles, iPads, or whatever supersedes them. We're getting there, if our journalist friends can just hold on while the rug gets pulled out from under them another five or six more times on the way to a new news world.