1) Breaking News
2) Daily News
3) Editorial/Analysis

The “breaking news” portion will be dominated by Twitter and its descendants. People will slowly adjust to the idea that the price they pay for immediacy is a lack of fact checking. Nobody will be paid to write content (except the shills of course!) so ads and other non-compulsory payment should make this possible. The 24×7 news channels are going to be hit hard once they realise that they’re essentially paying someone to read a Twitter feed on camera. This might take a while since there are still plenty of people who want to consume their breaking news via TV and radio but ultimately it’s doomed.

The “daily news” portion will also be online but more similar to traditional media in that it will be edited, superficially fact-checked and written by people who can write well. The writers may not be experts in the field that they’re writing about, but they’ll know enough to provide sharp summaries of the news items. It will be online, ad-supported but free to view. Of all the portions, I think this middle one is going to have the hardest time. The content produced is not valuable enough to encourage people to pay money for it but the cost of production is not cheap.

The “op-ed/analysis” portion will be available on several media and will start at the 30mins of audio or video or magazine article size. Some of it will be free to view, with the option to donate, but a lot of it will be paid-for. This portion will be the slowest but the most trustworthy.

The traditional media outlets will need to decide where they want to gravitate to. If I were them, I’d go exclusively into the analysis end of things since they have the advantage of having a load of the writing & production talent and having a sales & marketing organisation to sell the content. They can’t beat the net on speed and they’re better suited to competing on quality grounds rather than price so they’d have a very tough time producing breaking or daily news for the budget they’d have to do it in.

I see these categories of news fairly clearly in my own life. I use Twitter, IM and Boards.ie for “breaking news”. I listen to the Guardian Daily podcast every morning on my way to work for my daily summary. For the analysis end of things I’m back to Boards.ie, listening to podcasts like FLOSS Weekly (I’m recruiting listeners as fast as I can Randal! :)) and reading the Sunday Times. I only pay, or am willing to pay, for the third portion. It’s not that expensive either. At $5/month donation, FLOSS weekly works out at less than a euro per episode. The Sunday Times is more expensive, but not grossly so.

The only thing I’m missing is an Irish-focused (but not the parochial stuff that too often dominates RTE News) version of what Guardian Daily provides me. If it had a small tech slant I’d be delighted. Any ideas?

I think we are, to paraphrase Clay Shirky, in the middle of a revolution not dissimilar to the one surrounding the invention of the printing press.

Whatever the outcome for newspapers, real journalists will be required.

I appreciate your comments, and generally agree. I also wonder what will happen when we completely de-monetize all the “traditional media”, what will be left to comment on? It’s not like citizens on the ground would have uncovered Watergate, or accurately portrayed the horrors of Vietnam or Iraq. Paid journalists are still an essential component to inject new material into the echo chamber, and we’ll have to figure out how that gets paid in the long run.

For FLOSS Weekly, I’m also careful to interview the newsmakers themselves, not people reporting on the news, even though I’ve received frequent requests to interview other bloggers or journalists. It doesn’t make sense for me to give my audience second-hand news, especially when so many project leaders have already offered their time to jump into my pulpit for a hour or so.

The problem isn’t really down to anonymity – Deep Throat remained anonymous to all bar three people for decades and Nixon was still forced from office. The problems are verification and overwhelming commercial pressures. The former is obvious; the latter is why Jerry Springer and Bill O’Reilly and the 24-hour news networks stay on the air. There’s always a chunk of society’s lowest common denominator looking to watch crap rather than read a book, and there’s always a news magnate waiting to feed them that crap for a fee; and the system is darwinian evolution on a short timescale, with fitness being determined by total net worth. Any news channel that tries to produce quality work, to concern themselves with a social agenda like educating and informing the populace, gets gutted in the market by Jerry Springer “interviewing” N people with .

There are solutions, but they’re politically unsavory. In telecoms, Telecom Eireann (and later Eircom) had a social mandate as a semi-state; if you were in the rear end of nowhere and wanted a phone, you got it for the same price as a guy across the road from an exchange. Installation price differences were eaten by the company (and the state if needed). End result was Europe’s most advanced telecoms network in the mid-90s. Now that’s a social directive with an easily measurable metric; giving something similar to RTE would be difficult because it’s hard to measure how well-informed RTE are keeping a population which may not even watch it. It’s harder still because outside of theory, measuring the quality of information is not an objective process. And it’s stillborn because those who’d have to put in place such a directive would have to act against their own personal interests to do so; and it’s further choked by the actual wording of the constitution on the right to freedom of speech.

Social media has the advantage here. It doesn’t require large capital investments, it has infrastructural costs which are zero by comparison to mainstream media, and it’s got a far wider audience from the start.

The problem is, we don’t yet have an editing&verification layer in place. Things like the Huffington Post, peer rating systems like slashdot’s, volunteer moderation like boards.ie and other systems are only preliminary sketches. The “real” layer hasn’t been invented yet. And if mainstream media is anything to go by, may never be. And it’s not just a problem for websites or news channels, it’s a social problem the entire species could do with solving…