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Here's Andrea Pitzer, editor of our terrific sister site Nieman Storyboard, on what 2011 will bring for narrative and storytelling.
In the coming year, long-form text/print narratives will continue at a handful of U.S. newspapers, and we'll still see stories from talented writers who will manage to cobble a career (sometimes a stellar one) out of their teaching and books or magazine articles. Aspiring storytellers will get less personal coaching, even as a broader range of people will be able to access information on craft via YouTube and writers' networks.
Digital stories will continue to nibble away at print's dominance of fabulous narrative—look for more things like Jay Caspian Kang's "The High Is Always the Pain, and the Pain Is Always the High," or Jake Bogoch's "School of Fight" to introduce you to talented writers you've never heard of. A few places, like Slate, Frontline, and nonprofit journalism orgs, will continue their savvy commitment to carving out digital space for storytelling with news value that takes time or space to unfold.
These are all extensions of existing trends. So what will be new in 2011? I predict that the shift to visual narrative will pick up the pace a little, with at least one new storyteller producing surprising short-form nonfiction narrative video that will grab and hold an audience in the millions about an important issue. (By this, I mean a constructed story, not the situational video records like the death of Neda Soltan or the innovative testimonials of the "It Gets Better" campaign.)
And we'll see social media reflected more and more in our story constructs and in the stories themselves. Curation tools are beginning to make it possible to tell stories in new forms that can make use of literary techniques — I'm still thinking about the way that Mandy Jenkins of TBD managed to recreate the moment-by-moment suspense and confusion in the wake of a death outside a D.C. nightclub. These kinds of tools for gathering and presenting social media will make it possible for new epistolary models like Slate's mock presidential Facebook feed or collaborative Twitter efforts to serve as inspiration for nonfiction narratives.
Still, this new storytelling will likely be pretty messy through 2011. Telling a story depends on building a compelling arc, but it also relies on an audience finding a way to engage with the narrative. Quality work may fail to connect to audiences; other new-style narratives that have innovative, exciting aspects may not yet work as a whole.
I also believe that the future is often a surprise, and so it's possible that Geico commercials, the discovery of extraterrestrial life, or something that we can't even imagine right now might play an important role in how we'll tell stories in the future. But I wouldn't give up on Instapaper and long-form stories just yet.
In case you haven't noticed, we've been writing a lot about what a variety of smart people think 2011 will bring to the world of journalism. Will paywall go up everywhere or come tumbling down? Will hyperlocal thrive? Will nonprofits run out of donors?
But beyond the predictions of the noted and notable, we wanted to ask you, the Lab reader, what you thought was coming. We did so in the form of a 25-question survey, and here are the results.
Important note: This survey is wildly unscientific. Fifty people completed it, and not everyone answered every question. Talk with your physician before using any of these isolated data points to wager any money or make decisions of even the slightest import. The intention here was to get a broad idea of what our readers are thinking, and maybe to be entertaining. Capice?
Here are the questions and what the survey said, Richard Dawson-style:
Two of the biggest online-only brands stood above the crowd: The Huffington Post (27 percent) and Gawker Media (15 percent). The Daily Beast, Mashable, and Patch also got more than one vote. Among those getting single mentions: Flipboard, Inside Higher Ed, StockTwits, and The Batavian.
As might be expected, ProPublica led the way with 24 percent of votes. Talking Points Memo, Politico, The Texas Tribune, Slate, The Daily Beast, and Patch also got multiple votes. (Politico's nature as online-dominant in audience, print-dominant in revenue makes it a tough news org to squeeze in the online-only category.)
Getting single mentions, among others, were Left Coast nonprofits Bay Citizen, Voice of San Diego, and California Watch, plus for-profits GlobalPost, TBD, and GigaOM.
One wag suggested "Clay Rosen," squeezing the two top vote-getters into one: Clay Shirky (20 percent of votes) and Jay Rosen (11 percent). Jon Stewart, Ken Doctor, and Mark Cuban got multiple votes each. Getting single mentions: Julian Assange, Steve Jobs, Tim Wu, Tim O'Reilly, and Jonathan Zittrain, among others.
John Paton's efforts to turn around the moribund Journal Register Co. have gotten noticed: he led the way with 14 percent of votes, far outpacing The Guardian's Alan Rusbridger and CUNY's Jeff Jarvis. (Personally, I would have put Jeff in the Clay/Jay outsider category, but he wears enough hats that he could probably fit anywhere.) Others getting mentions: WaPo/TBD-ex Jim Brady, New York's Adam Moss, Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall, Gawker's Nick Denton, and Rupert Murdoch.
These ran the gamut. Among the most interesting:
— A major U.S. city will lose its one remaining major metro daily.
— Newspapers will be caught with their pants down for mobile usage in 2011, with website usage dropping and moving to mobile competitors.
— The beginning of more widespread paywalls, which will work for some but fail for most.
— Mobile traffic — especially tablets — rises by 30 percent.
— Partisans will attack mainstream media outlets for percieved bias. Websites will be hit. Bastions of populism will be humbled.
— Revenue from e-content (online, iPad, Kindle, smartphones, etc.) will exceed revenue from traditional sources.
— Stories will tend to focus on continued congressional bickering, while ignoring the stagnating economy and reputation of the U.S. in times of dramatic shifts in global power structures for the budding generations of tech natives.
— The Awl will be acquired.
— Twitter will launch a branded international news aggregation service, similar to the AP, but focused on real-time online content. It will be staffed with former newspaper journalists.
Optimism (of a sort) abides: The top answer was "none," with 32 percent of responses. None of the answers got much momentum, though Newsweek, The San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, The Detroit News, and Forbes each got two or more mentions.
Voting was close: 47 percent think the paywall will be judged a success; 53 percent think it'll fall short of expectations. Whatever those are.
The most popular answer was three newspapers. Given that The Wall Street Journal is already bepaywalled, and the Times is set to join that number in a few weeks, the popularity of three suggests most surveyed don't think the paywall momentum will spread too far beyond that. (Here's the current list of the countries biggest papers.)
A really scattershot response to a pretty scattershot question. Maureen Dowd got three votes, Ezra Klein and David Carr two each. Among the more unexpection mentions: Malcolm Gladwell, Ira Glass, and Dexter Filkins. (Maybe someone thinks The New Yorker is primarily an online operation.)
Most folks believe Patch will still be under 1,000 by next year's end. (I'm not so sure.)
Old media wins — barely: 57 percent say the NYT, 43 percent HuffPo.
These numbers don't shake out like the primetime ratings do: 41 percent say CNN, 37 percent say Fox, and 22 percent say MSNBC.
The Washington Post wins out, 80 percent to 20 percent.
Perhaps a trick question, depending on how NewsBeast finally decides to handle its URLs. But 83 percent think the Beast half will win out.
Another close call: 56 percent say Google, 44 percent Facebook.
Our survey takers weren't Rupert optimists: 36 percent say it'll be a success, with 64 percent saying no.
The answers were a random spray: no two predictions matched up. Some of the more intriguing: AOL and Yahoo, Tribune and Yahoo, US Weekly and The Huffington Post, Slate and The Atlantic, TBD and the Washington City Paper, Clear Channel and Pandora, Politico and Roll Call, and Gannett and Groupon. (Although if Groupon can turn down Google's money, I can't imagine them hitching themselves to a newspaper wagon.)
Messrs. Sulzberger, Keller, and Slim (among others) should be happy with the results: The New York Times was the runaway winner, garnering 44 percent of all votes cast. Tying for a distant second (at 9 percent) were The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal. Others getting votes: ESPN, NPR, and Reuters.
82 percent of survey-takers said yes, mobile would make up a tenth of total web traffic in 2011. Current estimates vary, but these suggest the current number's around four percent.
Average answer: 11.8 million. Median answer: 10 million. Mode: also 10 million. One pessimist suggested 4 million, portending great doom for the Twitter platform; the biggest twoptimist (ugh) guessed 25 million.
Again, optimism reigns: 40 percent of respondents said no significant outlets will close in 2011. Salon and Slate led the way among those who thing one will.
They passed 500 million this year. 56 percent of survey takers say they'll hit a billion in 2011.
The aggregators will continue to take slots away from news orgs, survey says: 74 percent of respondents said they expected news orgs to publish less than half of the top 10 apps.
The most common prediction (48 percent) was for continued but unspectacular growth in 2011, to somewhere between 4 and 6 million. An optimistic 17 percent said Foursquare will surpass 10 million active users; a pessimistic 7 percent said it'll drop below its current user base.
57 percent of survey-takers predict Android beating out Apple's mobile products. This is another area with lots of warring numbers, but these numbers suggest Android still has some catching up to do — especially if the iPhone heads to Verizon in the U.S. in 2011.
As we draw to a close, it's time for this year's predictions from Martin Langeveld, which are the closest thing we have to a tradition around here. We just posted a look back at Martin's predictions for 2010, a year ago. Here's what he foresees for 2011; check back next year to see how he did.
Digital convergence: News, mobile, tablets, social couponing, location-based services, RFID tags, gaming. My geezer head spins just thinking about all this, but look: All these things will not stay in separate silos. Why do you think AOL invested $50 million or more launching Patch in 500 markets, without a business model that makes sense to anyone? What's coming down the pike is new intersections between all of these digital developments, and somehow, news is always in the picture because it's at the top of people's lists of content needs, right after email and search. There are business opportunities in tying all of these things together, so there are opportunities for news enterprises to be part of the action. Some attempts to find synergies will work, and some won't.
But imagine for a moment: personalized news delivered to me on my tablet or smartphone, tailored to my demographics, preferences, and location; coupon offers and input from my social network, delivered on the same basis; the ability to interact with RFID tags on merchandise (and on just about anything else); more and more ability not only to view ads but to do transactions on tablets and phones — all of these delivered in a entertaining interfaces with gaming features (if I like games) or not (if I don't). In other words: news delivered to me as part of a total environment aware of my location, my friends, my interests and preferences, essentially in a completely new online medium — not a web composed of sites I can browse at my leisure, but a medium delivered via a device or devices that understand me and understand what I want to know, including the news, information and commercial offers that are right for me. All of this is way too much to expect in 2011, but as a prediction, I think we'll start to see some of the elements begin to come together, especially on the iPad.
The Associated Press clearinghouse for news. Lots of questions here: Will be it nonprofit or for-profit? Who will put up the money? Who will be in charge of it? What will it actually do? It will probably take all year to get the operation organized and launched, but I'm going to stick with the listing of opportunities I outlined when news of the clearinghouse broke. I continue to believe that the clearinghouse concept has the potential to transform the way that news content is generated, distributed and consumed. (Disclosure: I'm working on a project with the University of Missouri to explore potential business models enabled by news clearinghouses.)
Embracing real digital strategies. Among newspaper companies, Journal Register will continue to point the way: CEO John Paton ardently evangelizes for digital-first thinking — read his presentation to the recent (Nieman-cosponsored) INMA Transformation of News Summit, if you haven't seen it. Is there another newspaper company CEO who agrees with Paton's mantra, "Be Digital First and Print Last"? I doubt it, because what it means, in Patton's words, is that you "put the digital people in charge, and stop listening to the newspaper people." Most newspaper groups pay lip service to "digital first," but in reality they're focused on the daily print edition. And that's why audience attention will continue to go to new media unencumbered by print, like Huffington Post, the Daily Beast, Patch, Gawker Media, and hosts of others. So for a prediction: Journal Register will outsource most of its printing, sell most of its real estate, bring the audience into its newsrooms with more news cafes like their first one in Torrington, Conn. It will announce by year end that 25 percent of its revenue is from digital sources. It will also launch online-only startups in cities and towns near its existing markets, perhaps with niche print spinoffs. And finally, toward the end of 2011, we'll see some reluctant and tentative emulation of Paton's strategies among a few other newspaper groups.
Newspaper advertising revenue. An extrapolation of the 2010 trend (see my 2010 scorecard) would mean 2011 quarters of, say gains of 2 percent, 4 percent, 6 percent and 8 percent. But for that to happen, marketers would have to decide, during Q4 of 2011, to direct 8 percent more money into advertising in a medium that continues to report "strategic" cuts in press runs and paid print circulation, that is not finding fresh eyeballs online, that has an audience profile getting older every year, and that has done little R&D or innovation to discover a digital future for itself. With sexy new opportunities to advertise on tablets and smartphones coming along daily, why would any brand, retailer, or advertising agency be looking to spend more in print? My prediction is for a very flat year, with the quarterly totals (for print plus online revenue) coming in at Q1: +1.5%, Q2: +2.0%, Q3: no change and Q4: -3%. That final quarter will revert to negative territory primarily because of major shifts in retail budgets to tablet and smartphone platforms and to digital competitors like Groupon.
Newspaper online ad revenue. This has been a bright spot in 2010, with gains of 4.9 percent, 13.9 percent, and 10.7 percent so far. Assume another gain in Q4. But there are several problems. First, at most newspapers a big fraction of so-called online revenue is hitched to print programs with online components, upsells, added values, or bonuses. So there's no way to tell whether the reported numbers are real, representing actual gains purely in ads purchased on web sites, whether there's a lot of creative accounting going on to make the online category look better than it actually is, or whether it would even exist without the print component. Secondly, there's a lot of new competition at the local level for dollars that retailers earmark for web marketing. Groupon, alone, will do close to $1 billion in revenue this year, compared with about $3 billion total online revenue for all newspapers combined. Add the "Groupon clones" like LivingSocial, and the social couponing business is probably already at about 50 percent of newspaper online revenue, and could well pass it in 2011, very much at newspapers' expense. That's why I predict newspaper online revenue will be: Q1: +5.0 percent, Q2: +3.0 percent, Q3: no change and Q4: no change.
Newspaper circulation. The trendline here has been down, down, down, every six-month reporting period ending March 31 and September 30. Complicating the picture: newspapers have been selling combo packages, ABC-qualified, where a single subscriber counts for two because they are buying (sometimes on a forced basis) both a 7-day print subscription and a facsimile digital edition. Lots of inflated and un-real circulation will show up in the 2011 numbers. But if we look at print circulation alone, which ABC will continue to break out, demographics alone dictate a continuation of the negative trend. My prediction: down 5 percent in each of the spring and fall six-month ABC reporting periods. That will mean that by year's end, print newspaper penetration will fall to about one in three households (a long way down from its postwar peak of 134 newspapers sold per 100 households in 1946).
Online news readership. There are a couple of ways to look at this. For newspaper websites, NAA recently switched from Nielsen to Comscore because they liked Comscore's numbers better. As a base measure, Comscore is showing about 105 million monthly unique visitors and 4 billion pageviews to newspaper sites, with the average visitor spending 3.5 minutes per visit. Prediction: all three of those metrics will stay flat (plus or minus 10 percent) during 2011. The other way to look at it is: Where are Americans getting their news? The Pew Research Center looks at this on an annual basis, and in 2010 showed online, radio, and newspapers more or less tied as news sources for Americans. Is there any doubt where this is going? In 2011, Pew might add mobile as a distinct source, but it will show online clearly ahead of newspapers and radio, with mobile ascendant.
Newspaper chains. Nobody can afford to buy anybody else, and no non-newspaper companies want to buy newspapers. There might be some mergers, but really, there are no strategic opportunities for consolidation in this industry, because there are no major efficiencies or revenue opportunities to be gained. Everybody will just muddle along in 2011, with the exception of Journal Register, which as noted above will move into adjacent markets with digital products and generally show the way the rest should follow.
Stocks. The major indices will be up 15 to 20 percent by September, but they'll drop back to a break-even position by the end of 2011. Newspaper stocks will not beat the market. Others: AOL and Google will beat the market; Yahoo and Microsoft will not.
Here's digital media consultant Amy Webb of Webbmedia Group, on hyperlocal startups, tablets, geofencing, and more.
Every device that connects to the Internet, from mobile phones to MiFis to computers to TiVOs, needs a unique ID number (also called an IP address) in order to make contact with other devices on the network. The world will run out of addresses by March 2011. This means that for those in developing areas like China and India who finally have access to technology, they won't be able to get online. But it also means that large-scale U.S. providers such as Comcast won't be able to support new customers as they have in the past. Why? Our current standard, IPv4, is the Internet Protocol developed in 1981. It's been 30 years, and we're out of numbers. The next iteration is IPv6, which is ultimately more secure and is much more extensible. Eventually, ISPs will have to make the switch and migrate all of their customers. However, those people connecting via IPv6 won't be able to access content that's being housed on IPv4. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, local blogs — basically any content producer who hopes to continue reaching a worldwide audience — will either have to start migration now or will face losing millions of visitors starting Q3 next year.
Lots of new hyperlocal initiatives will launch before summer 2011 by a vast number of traditional media organizations. Millions and millions of dollars will be spent recreating templated sites based on zip code or geography alone. All of the local ad dollars being counted on will instead shift towards social commerce sites like LivingSocial and Groupon, which have started to include compelling editorial content. Interest among journalists will grow, while consumer interest continues to stagnate. Only the hyper-personal sites that focus on niche content and geography rather than neighborhoods alone will succeed.
2011 will be the year of the tablet. We'll see close to two dozen tablets come to market, most running some version of Android. Consumers will continue to love the iPad, while publishers will continue developing what is essentially a web-centric experience for a device that does much, much more. Smart entrepreneurs will leapfrog traditional news organizations by focusing on dynamic content curation via algorithm. Think Pulse 2.0, Flipboard, Wavii — but even more engaging.
Geofencing will become an integral part of the checkin experience in 2011. Right now, many mobile social networks use a fuzzy radius to locate members, and it's easy to game the system. But it's also harder for retailers and others interested in social commerce to effectively use networks like Foursquare and Gowalla because it's difficult to verify that a user is actually inside of a store or at a specific location. For news orgs trying to syndicate content, the best many can do now is to leave vague tips around town. Geofencing technology requires very strict location parameters, allowing a number of interesting possibilities. For example, check-ins can be triggered automatically, expiring assets (such as event tickets or breaking news alerts) can be pushed to users, and a moving target — like a parade or car chase — can be tracked or commented on. And with geofencing, someone can't check into his favorite restaurant repeatedly while driving past it his way to work.
Data-filled firehoses will spring leaks everywhere in 2011. And not just WikiLeaks. Twitter is releasing a personal metrics dashboard soon. Other social networks are discussing how to release data streams about and for their users and the content being discussed. News organizations will soon find a fantastic opportunity to harness all of that data, to parse it, and to develop stories about everything from the U.S. government to our cultural zeitgeist. DocumentCloud is a breakthrough, an essential tool developed by journalists for journalists. I hope to see more of its ilk released in 2011.
Here, Jennifer 8. Lee gives us predictions, about the growing role of raw data, the importance of APIs, and the need for a break-out civic mobile app.
In 2011 there will be a slew of riffs on the WikiLeaks anonymous dropbox scheme, sans gender drama — at least one of them by former WikiLeakers themselves. It will remain to be seen how protective the technologies are.
Basically, this codifies the rise of primary source materials — documents, video, photos — as cohesive units of consumable journalism. Turns out, despite the great push for citizen journalism, citizens are not, on average, great at "journalism." But they are excellent conduits for raw material — those documents, videos, or photos. They record events digitally as an eyewitness, obtain documents through Freedom of Information requests, or have access to files through the work they do. We are seeing an important element of accountability journalism emerge.
Big Brother has long been raised as a threat of technological advancement (and certainly the National Security Agency has done its fair share of snooping). But in reality, it is the encroachment of Little Brother that average Americans are more likely to feel in our day-to-day lives — that people around us carry digital devices that can be pulled out for photo or videos, or they can easily copy digital files (compared to the months of covert photocopying that Ellsberg did for 7,000 pages) that others would rather not have shared with the world.
One notable strength of raw material is that it has a natural viral lift for two reasons: audience engagement, and the way legacy media operates with regard to sourcing and competition. Social media is a three-legged stool: create, consume, and share content. Because original material often feels more like an original discovery, it is more appealing to share. Documents, videos, and photos are there for anyone to examine and experience firsthand. The audience can interpret, debate, comment as they choose, and they feel greater freedom to reupload and remix that material, especially video.
There will also be an explosion in shift from raw data to information made available by application programming interfaces. A good example is ScraperWiki, out of the United Kingdom, which scrapes government data into repositories and then makes it available in an API.
Government agencies are hearing the public cry for data, and they are making raw data available. Sometimes it's in friendlier formats like .csv or .xls. Sometimes it is in less usable formats, like PDF (as the House of Representatives did with a 3,000-page PDF of expenses) and even .exe files. (As the Coast Guard's National Response Center has done with its incident data. It's an extractable .xls with a readme. I know. It makes a lot of people cringe. At least their site isn't also in Flash.) As part of this open push, the Obama administration has set up data.gov.
As that comes out, people are realizing that it's not enough to get the public to bite, even though the underlying data might contain interesting material. It needs to be even easier to access. A good example of what happens when something becomes easily searchable: ProPublica's Dollars for Docs project, on payments doctors received from pharmaceutical companies, generated an explosion of interest/investigations by taking data that was already technically public and standardizing it to make it searchable on the Internet.
What we're still waiting for: The break-out civic mobile app, a combination of Craigslist and Foursquare, where a critical mass of people can "check in" with comments, photos and complaints about their local community. It's unclear how this will happen. Perhaps it will be built on the geolocation tools offered by Facebook or Twitter. Perhaps it will be an extension of Craigslist, which already has a brand associated with local community. Perhaps it'll be something like SeeClickFix, which allows people to register complaint about potholes or graffiti, or CitySeed, a mobile app the Knight Foundation has given a grant to develop.
[Disclosure: Both the Knight Foundation and Lee are financial supporters of the Lab.]
Here are 10 predictions from Vadim Lavrusik, community manager and social strategist at Mashable. Mashable, where these predictions first appeared, covers the heck out of the world of social media and have an honored place in our iPhone app.
In many ways, 2010 was finally the year of mobile for news media, and especially so if you consider the iPad a mobile device. Many news organizations like The Washington Post and CNN included heavy social media integrations into their apps, opening the devices beyond news consumption.
In 2011, the focus on mobile will continue to grow with the launch of mobile- and iPad-only news products, but the greater focus for news media in 2011 will be on re-imagining its approach to the open social web. The focus will shift from searchable news to social and share-able news, as social media referrals close the gap on search traffic for more news organizations. In the coming year, news media's focus will be affected by the personalization of news consumption and social media's influence on journalism.
In 2010, we saw the rise of WikiLeaks through its many controversial leaks. With each leak, the organization learned and evolved its process in distributing sensitive classified information. In 2011, we'll see several governments prosecute WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for his role in disseminating classified documents and some charges will have varying successes. But even if WikiLeaks itself gets shut down, we're going to see the rise of "leakification" in journalism, and more importantly we'll see a number of new media entities, not just mirror sites, that will model themselves to serve whistle blowers — WikiLeaks copycats of sorts. Toward the end of this year, we already saw Openleaks, Brusselsleaks, and Tradeleaks. There will be many more, some of which will be focused on niche topics.
Just like with other media entities, there will be a new competitive market and some will distinguish themselves and rise above the rest. So how will success be measured? The scale of the leak, the organization's ability to distribute it and its ability or inability to partner with media organizations. Perhaps some will distinguish themselves by creating better distribution platforms through their own sites by focusing on the technology and, of course, the analysis of the leaks. The entities will still rely on partnerships with established media to distribute and analyze the information, but it may very well change the relationship whistleblowers have had with media organizations until now.
At the tail end of 2010, we saw the acquisition of TechCrunch by AOL and the Newsweek merger with The Daily Beast. In some ways, these moves have been a validation in the value of new media companies and blogs that have built an audience and a business.
But as some established news companies' traditional sources of revenue continue to decline, while new media companies grow, 2011 may bring more media mergers and acquisitions. The question isn't if, but who? I think that just like this year, most will be surprises.
In 2010, as news consumption began to shift to mobile devices, we saw news organizations take mobile seriously. Aside from launching mobile apps across various mobile platforms, perhaps the most notable example is News Corp's plan to launch The Daily, an iPad-only news organization that is set to launch early 2011. Each new edition will cost $0.99 to download, though Apple will take 30%. But that's not the only hurdle, as the publication relies on an iPad-owning audience. There will have been 15.7 million tablets sold worldwide in 2010, and the iPad represents roughly 85% of that. However, that number is expected to more than double in 2011. Despite a business gamble, this positions news organizations like The Daily for growth, and with little competition, besides news organizations that repurpose their web content. We've also seen the launch of an iPad-only magazine with Virgin's Project and of course the soon-to-launch News.me social news iPad application from Betaworks.
But it's not just an iPad-only approach, and some would argue that the iPad isn't actually mobile; it's leisurely (yes, Mark Zuckerberg). In 2011, we'll see more news media startups take a mobile-first approach to launching their companies. This sets them up to be competitive by distributing on a completely new platform, where users are more comfortable with making purchases. We're going to see more news companies that reverse the typical model of website first and mobile second.
In 2010, we saw the growth of location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and SCVNGR. Even Facebook entered the location game by launching its Places product, and Google introduced HotPot, a recommendation engine for places and began testing it in Portland. The reality is that only 4% of online adults use such services on the go. My guess is that as the information users get on-the-go info from such services, they'll becomes more valuable and these location-based platforms will attract more users.
Part of the missing piece is being able to easily get geo-tagged news content and information based on your GPS location. In 2011, with a continued shift toward mobile news consumption, we're going to see news organizations implement location-based news features into their mobile apps. And of course if they do not, a startup will enter the market to create a solution to this problem or the likes of Foursquare or another company will begin to pull in geo-tagged content associated with locations as users check in.
In 2010, we saw social media usage continue to surge globally. Facebook alone gets 25% of all U.S. pageviews and roughly 10% of Internet visits. Instead of focusing on search engine optimization (SEO), in 2011 we'll see social media optimization become a priority at many news organizations, as they continue to see social close the gap on referrals to their sites.
Ken Doctor, author of Newsonomics and news industry analyst at Outsell, recently pointed out that social networks have become the fastest growing source of traffic referrals for many news sites. For many, social sites like Facebook and Twitter only account for 10% to 15% of their overall referrals, but are number one in growth. For news startups, the results are even more heavy on social. And of course, the quality of these referrals is often better than readers who come from search. They generally yield more pageviews and represent a more loyal reader than the one-off visitors who stumble across the site from Google.
What we've known as the role of the foreign correspondent will largely cease to exist in 2011. As a result of business pressures and the roles the citizenry now play in using digital technology to share and distribute news abroad, the role of a foreign correspondent reporting from an overseas bureau "may no longer be central to how we learn about the world," according to a recent study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of of Journalism. The light in the gloomy assessment is that there is opportunity in other parts of the world, such as Asia and Africa, where media is expanding as a result of "economic and policy stability," according to the report. In 2011, we'll see more news organizations relying heavily on stringers and, in many cases, social content uploaded by the citizenry.
Syndication models will be disrupted in 2011. As Clay Shirky recently predicted, more news outlets will get out of the business of re-running the same story on their site that appeared elsewhere. Though this is generally true, the approach to syndication will vary based on the outlet. The reality is that the content market has become highly fragmented, and if content is king, then niche is certainly queen. Niche outlets, which were once curators of original content produced by established organizations, will focus more on producing original content. While established news brands, still under pressure to produce a massive amount of content despite reduced staff numbers, will become the ultimate curators. This means they will feature just as much content, but instead through syndication partners.
You already see this taking place on sites like CNN.com or NYTimes.com, both of whose technology sections feature headlines and syndicated content from niche technology publications. In this case, it won't only be the reader demand for original content that drives niche publications to produce more original content, but also its relationship with established organizations that strive to uphold the quality of their content and the credibility of their brand. Though original content will be rewarded, specialized, niche publications could benefit the most from the disruption.
In 2010, we saw social content get weaved into storytelling, in some cases to tell the whole story and in other cases to contextualize news events with curation tools such as Storify. We also saw the rise of social news readers, such as Flipboard and Pulse mobile apps and others.
In 2011, we'll not only see social curation as part of storytelling, but we'll see social and technology companies getting involved in the content creation and curation business, helping to find the signal in the noise of information.
We've already heard that YouTube is in talks to buy a video production company, but it wouldn't be a surprise for the likes of Twitter or Facebook to play a more pivotal role in harnessing its data to present relevant news and content to its users. What if Facebook had a news landing page of the trending news content that users are discussing? Or if Twitter filtered its content to bring you the most relevant and curated tweets around news events?
In 2010, news organizations began to take social media more seriously and we saw many news organizations hire editors to oversee social media. USA Today recently appointed a social media editor, while The New York Times dropped the title, and handed off the ropes to Aron Pilhofer's interactive news team.
The Times' move to restructure its social media strategy, by going from a centralized model to a decentralized one owned by multiple editors and content producers in the newsroom, shows us that news organizations are becoming more sophisticated and strategic with their approach to integrating social into the journalism process. In 2011, we're going to see more news organizations decentralize their social media strategy from one person to multiple editors and journalists, which will create an integrated and more streamlined approach. It won't just be one editor updating or managing a news organization's process, but instead news organizations will work toward a model in which each journalist serves as his or her own community manager.
In 2010, many people were introduced to Internet TV for the first time, as buzz about the likes of Google TV, iTV, Boxee Box and others proliferated headlines across the web. In 2011, the accessibility to Internet TV will transform television as we know it in not only the way content is presented, but it will also disrupt the dominance traditional TV has had for years in capturing ad dollars.
Americans now spend as much time using the Internet as they do watching television, and the reality is that half are doing both at the same time. The problem of being able to have a conversation with others about a show you're watching has existed for some time, and users have mostly reacted to the problem by hosting informal conversations via Facebook threads and Twitter hashtags. Companies like Twitter are recognizing the problem and finding ways to make the television experience interactive.
It's not only the interaction, but the way we consume content. Internet TV will also create a transition for those used to consuming video content through TVs and bring them to the web. That doesn't mean that flat screens are going away; instead, they will only become interconnected to the web and its many content offerings.
Not everyone agrees. Scott Karp runs Publish2, which is trying to build its own syndication model for journalism. Here's Scott's response to Clay and his own set of predictions for syndication in 2011.
Clay Shirky predicts that in 2011 traditional news syndication will see widespread disruption. I couldn't agree more. But I don't think the disruption will happen the way Clay describes it.
Clay's prediction assumes that news consumption will continue its shift from traditional media to the traditional desktop web, where the hyperlink rules and news consumers bounce from hyperlinked page to hyperlinked page and from site to site to site. I think that assumption is wrong. In 2011, we'll see open acknowledgement of what has long been understood about the traditional desktop web as a platform for consuming news content — it sucks.
The desktop web has been a revolutionary platform in terms of access to information, the democratization of publishing, and the socialization of media. But as a medium for consuming news content, from a user interface and user experience perspective, it's problematic at best and downright awful at worst. News consumption has begun a major shift from the traditional desktop web to apps for touch tablets for a simple reason — the user experience and user interface are so much better, as the recent RJI survey of iPad users reflects. Consumers are choosing tablet apps over the traditional desktop web based on the quality of the user experience and the overall content "package."
News organizations are already shifting their strategies to take advantage of that consumer shift. But few have thought about the role of syndication in news apps. With the immersive, hands-on experience of a tablet news app, the value of syndication changes entirely. Apps that deliver nothing but one news organization's content will not compare favorably with the content richness of the web, no matter how good the UI is. And apps that bounce users around from site to site with an in-app browser, mimicking the traditional desktop web model, will fail for precisely the reason why users chose the app in the first place.
But news apps that can deliver full content, curated from a wide range of sources, within a cohesive, optimized — even breakthrough — UI for news consumption, will win because users will have the best of both worlds. Syndication in news apps will not be about republishing news that everyone else has. It will be about combining curated news with original content in order to create consumer packages that are deeply engaging and in many cases worth paying for. With this shift, news organizations will stop ceding to aggregators the huge value creation of curating and packaging news. Instead, news organizations will start defining their editorial brands as curators as much as they define them as original content creators.
It's important to note that this new paradigm for news consumption isn't necessarily anti-web on the back end. It can work with an HTML5 site that creates the same immersive UX/UI as a platform-native app, and can be distributed with an app front end via app stores to support the news org's business model. Web pages are also still necessary for links shared via social networks. But for a news consumer's primary daily news consumption — for news orgs they have a direct relationship with — syndication that includes the full content in an immersive app experience will be an essential driver of success.
The other reality that Clay overlooks, on the other end of the news evolution, is that syndication for print newspapers still matters because the print product is generating the cash that's funding the digital transformation. Reducing the cost of filling the news hole in print with disruptive syndication models will generate more cash for digital. In the near term, that will have a significant impact on how the business of syndication is reshaped.
In that context, here are four predictions for how traditional news syndication will be disrupted in 2011:
Traditional syndication is based on a hub-and-spoke model, where a newswire middleman takes in content from many sources, combines it with original content, and redistributes it. This is an inefficient, obsolete model and will be replaced by a model that has proven wildly successful in the consumer world — the social network.
News organizations have already been forming direct distribution networks to route around the traditional newswire middleman. In 2011, these networks will evolve beyond ad hoc email distribution to become truly scalable in a way that only a Facebook-like platform can enable. News organizations will create a network of trusted sources, the equivalent of "friends," but where the relationships are based on distribution and the affiliation of editorial brands. I call this the "Content Graph," the analogue to Facebook's "Social Graph."
The business of syndication and news distribution will be reshaped by the power of network effects. Why is that important? Watch this Sean Parker talk.
Contrary to Clay's devaluing of the wire editor's judgment in selecting content, the value of human curation is actually becoming more important in defining the value of news brands. Google's algorithm has dominated news distribution on the web (ask any news site what percentage of traffic comes from Google), but it's being overtaken by social curation — links shared through social networks (ask any news site what percentage of traffic comes from Facebook and Twitter).
The same will happen with news organizations, as editors curate their Content Graph and create better editorial products than any algorithm can ever hope to create.
What social networks have proven is that people value most the judgment of other people they trust. You can trust a friend. You can trust the editor of your favorite news publication. But it's about people. Syndication based on human curation will prove far more valuable to consumers than syndication based on faceless algorithms.
The news industry has been disrupted by the explosion of content on the web and having to compete with free sources. A new model for syndication turns this disruption on its head by enabling news organizations to publish free content from high quality web publishers in exchange for branding and links back (a model that Yahoo, for example, has used for years).
News organizations can also barter content with partners to trade the value of content they have already paid to produce for content that they need. Syndication based on a barter economy will be extremely disruptive to traditional newswires charging for content.
Free syndicated content will also help the print product generate more cash in the near-term. (Never underestimate the importance of cash flow in business transformation.)
News organizations will increasingly take back control over how their own content is syndicated. This begins with taking back their rights from newswire middlemen, so they can have full control over the business strategy for their content syndication, whether they choose to barter, sell, or keep some content out of the syndication market entirely.
News organizations will also take control over how their content is packaged by aggregators, starting by taking control of their RSS feeds. The first big realization will be that RSS is dead as a consumer technology but has growing value as a B2B syndication mechanism. News organizations will start to take down the consumer feeds from their websites as they realize 99.9 percent of their audience who wants their "feed" is following them on Facebook or Twitter.
Instead of working ad hoc with aggregators and other partners, with no control over their B2B RSS feeds, news organizations will look for ways to more efficiently manage the commercial syndication of their content through a common platform that gives them both control and network scale.
Below are predictions from Andrew Golis, Dan Gillmor, Joe Grimm, Om Malik, Jim Brady, Seth Lewis, David Cohn, Jeff Israely, Barry Sussman, Evan Smith, and Joe Bergantino. Plus, to round things off, a few not-so-serious predictions from Dan Kennedy and Bob Garfield.
So, the question is: how much will journalism and media change in 2011? My answer: not much, actually. I know that's a contrarian view, at a time when so much seems to be in flux, so let me try to explain.
I think we tend to overestimate the volume of change that actually occurs in a given year, and at the same time underestimate the obduracy of individual and societal habits, routines, values, and bureaucratic systems. This doesn't mean change doesn't occur — of course it does! — but rather that it tends to be more incremental, more subtle, and even more glacial than we sometimes like to imagine. And I'm not trying to be a kill-joy here, for I love tracking the exciting future of journalism as much as anyone and have no particular fondness for the past. Rather, I'm coming at this question as a former journalist and present academic who studies the extent to which (professional) journalism's core identity — its ethics, worldview, fundamental practices, etc. — is evolving in the digital age. The research out there suggests that change does come, yes, but not without considerable resistance and reluctance on the part of professions and institutions.
So, what does this mean for 2011? Well, that we're more likely to see change occurring by degree rather than by kind. There will be more iPad news apps; more journalism crafted to take advantage of the social, viral, and "spreadable" nature of networked media; and more newsrooms experimenting with Big Data, both of the WikiLeaks and less sensational variety. There may even be some business-model breakthroughs as newspapers figure out a Groupon-like strategy for local advertising. But to see truly significant changes in kind — changes to the very DNA of journalism and how it gets accomplished — we may have to look beyond 2011, toward something like a five-year or even a ten-year time horizon. Just as we can see rather significant changes in news work as we look back over the past decade, it may be a long while yet before we appreciate what's really happening under our feet, and its impact (or lack thereof), in any particular year.
When I sit down and think about the future of media, I see two core problems with the media business at large. Most media entities tend to define themselves by features — magazines, newspapers, television and radio — while the audience aka the customers see media entities as "information" resources.
I think we are going to see the continuous destruction of value in the media industry because folks refuse to look beyond what is obvious and comfortable. That is precisely why we are going to see media industry lose a shirt on ill-conceived mobile applications, mostly because publishers want to replicate what they know best — an ambiguous, non-measurable advertising paradigm — on digital devices.
Similarly, the media entities will all come to a realization that chasing pageviews is a zero-sum game, and they are playing with a losing hand against zero-cost pageview-generation megafarms like Facebook, especially at a time when the modes of content consumption and discovery are changing. Content farms like Demand Media and Associated Content are commoditizing the value of banner ads and pageviews.
In 2011, I expect following to happen:
— Bloomberg will continue its march and become one of the most powerful media entities in the U.S. It has television assets to go along with web, print offerings (Bloomberg BusinessWeek), and data terminals — making it a company in the business of selling information.
— We will see continued implosion of large-scale media barring a handful of national/transnational brands such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. 2011 is going to be particularly hard for companies that have cut back on their core competency — journalism.
— MSNBC make a serious bid to acquire The Huffington Post.
— The Discovery Group will become one of the major media groups. The company has done a good job of merging its cable television and web businesses with a thriving e-commerce business, making it less reliant on pure advertising revenues. In 2011, Oprah joins the Discover family. What's good for Oprah is good for Om!
2011 will be the year online journalistic innovation reaches scale.
For the first time, a critical mass of journalists — not just a handful of early-adopters — have moved beyond learning the core skill set or figuring out the inherent incentives of the web. They've mastered the craft and the medium and are primed to push boundaries and innovate.
At the same time, those who have been experimenting — be it startup, nonprofit, amateur, or otherwise — are coming away from their projects with lessons learned. Now their ambitions and ideas are less abstract, more tangible and ready to be implemented.
And add to that the fact that major news organizations have stopped playing defense and are pivoting to invest in things that will excite their fickle, fragmenting audiences.
2011, then, will be the year millions of Americans see the kind of experimentation and innovation Nieman Lab readers have been following.
The "woe is us" crowd, which dominated the conversation for the past several years, will be largely supplanted by the "wow, let's try new things" multitudes who are experimenting with a huge variety of journalism and business models. We'll also stop looking for magic solutions to the "problem" of replacing monopoly and oligopoly profits, recognizing that the emerging media ecosystem will be diverse and, in the end, more robust. The outlines of tomorrow's ecosystem will begin to emerge as a small percentage of the experiments show signs of financial sustainability.
As we are flooded with more and more information, much of which is garbage, we'll see a strong move toward trusted sources. This will take many forms. One will be a classic retreat to quality, as the best news providers retain or earn positions of trust. Another will be progress toward increasingly sophisticated combinations of human and machine intelligence, where aggregation and curation are melded so that people and communities can sort out what they need and want based on quality, popularity and reputation. But we're also in the early days of this shift, so it won't happen in a mere 12 months.
Overhanging all this will be who controls the ecosystem. Will it be us, the users, or will it be powerful interests that clamp down on what we can do? I fear that 2011 will be more of the latter, as media and communications incumbents, aided by a government that increasingly wants to control what we can see and do online, erect more and more barriers to innovation. The people who favor a diverse and robust media ecosystem will realize they need to become more political — and as they do they'll help the public understand what's at stake.
Local will be the next hot thing. The continued rise of mobile and location-based services will be major factors in that emergence, and will help drive major innovations in local journalism. I predict a steady rise in locally based startups.
You'll see more longtime digital types abandoning their legacy roots and either going to web-only companies or starting their own things.
Social media will establish itself firmly as something that every media company will need to have a strategy and staff for. This isn't a fad.
Partnerships will be a strong theme. Companies that once would never have considered even talking to each other will begin forming partnerships in order to allow each to focus on its strengths. As a result, news sites will continue to become more niche.
The number of niche news startups employing fewer than 20 people will begin to increase, and begin to cause grief for larger, more general-interest news sites.
The paywall debate will drone on for another year, and at the end of it, there will still be equally dug-in camps on both extremes of the issue. (That's the prediction I feel most comfortable about).
In 2011, I expect to see some shakeout of traditional and innovative newsrooms. Some of the new ones will have hit the wall that tells them they don't have the right model to go forward. Legacy newsrooms seem to gaining traction with digital advertising and are feeling some traditional advertisers come back, but they have been substantially weakened and devalued. With the amount of cash that is sitting idle, I expect we will see some acquisitions among traditional media companies. The prize in those deals will be the content parts of the operations, of course.
I would not surprised if some traditional newsrooms are absorbed by digital companies looking to build credibly news-oriented footprints fast. Watch Yahoo! and Facebook in 2011 to see how they try to grow their reputations as news sources.
Mobile and tablets will continue to boom, with some shakeout among devices and a real gold rush to build apps, backed up by original news and news aggregation. Individualized services or services curated by friends will grow.
The WikiLeaks phenomenon will continue. As Julian Assange has recently said, he'll move out of military leaks and into Wall Street. Instead of being unpatriotic, there will be new legal claims blasted at them (copyright, IP, privacy). The ongoing drama of Julian Assange will come to a head in some way shape or form (arrested, killed, stepping down), but WikiLeaks or another organization with the same ethos will remain. Somehow it must move beyond Julian Assange and just be WikiLeaks, or another leak-esque organization that doesn't have a cult of personality.
The New York Times pay ramp will launch. It will neither be a huge success or a huge failure. The nature of the pay ramp means that the vast majority of people will still get free content from the Times. They'll only be able to ask people who come to the site regularly to pony up some money. And that amount of money will have to be high enough to compensate for the loss in advertising dollars (when X percent of readers leave) and low enough that the X percent is as low as possible.
As a result, it'll work. It might even make them some money. But the margin of error is so small here — if they charge too early or too much — that it won't really solve the problem of print dollars to digital dimes.
Next year will mark the end of the pay vs. free debate as we've known it. In 2011, those on either side of the question who speak about it in ideological/philosophical/historical terms will begin to sound, like, so 2000s. We can all now agree that information neither "wants to be free" nor is a consumer good like any other. The confluence of more and cheaper tablets on the market, the Times' metered-model rollout and Murdoch's continued (and intentional) overplaying of his hand with thick paywalls will combine to help close the black-or-white era of this debate.
This doesn't mean that next to the barrel-chested Murdoch, The New York Times will not look a bit, er, wimpy in its halting moves to charge for some of its content. But even if it has trouble finding the sweet spot on the meter (or communicating its intentions), it will become clear rather quickly in 2011 that for a quality/global news gathering organization like The New York Times, there is no turning back to the days of all free access. This is also does not mean that the Guardian or Des Moines Register or Twitter for that matter can't have another approach. But from now on, they'll always have to explain their choice in strategic terms.
Meanwhile, Julian Assange has shown that there are still plenty of religious battle lines to be drawn around the Internet and information, without having to debate whether it is right or wrong to charge people (who can afford it) for news and let those who would rather spend their money elsewhere find the free stuff.
Stories by nonprofit, online news organizations already have a foothold in elite national newspapers — but nothing like the prominence they'll have in 2011. They will produce strong watchdog reporting and, as a result, they'll draw sharply increased funding from individual large donors.
More meaningful collaborations between nonprofits and for-profits!
Public TV and public radio will take a much more proactive role in helping fill the investigative reporting void that's resulted from cutbacks at commercial media outlets.
Many more newspapers will attempt to monetize their websites with paywalls for "exclusive" content.
The experiments to pool, among local TV stations, more types of news coverage, will accelerate over the next year —leading eventually to the end of an era in which most major cities have at least three or four TV stations airing several newscasts.
AOL executives, despairing at the dearth of advertising on their hyperlocal Patch.com sites will hit upon a bold new strategy: print. "We believe that publishing weekly community newspapers will prove to be the hottest new media idea since Twitter," AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong will say. "A study we conducted shows that local businesses such as hardware stores, funeral homes, and nail salons are far more likely to advertise in a newspaper than online. Our goal is nothing less than to revolutionize local journalism and the business model that supports it." Kirk Davis, president of GateHouse Media, which publishes nearly 400 weekly and daily community newspapers across the United States, will not be reachable for comment.
Time magazine will name Google's ruling troika its Persons of the Year for 2011. In singling out chairman Eric Schmidt and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the magazine will explain: "In a digital media world in which most consumers are all too willing to live under Apple's semi-benign dictatorship, Google has kept the flame of openness alive, selling tablet computers and smartphones for which anyone can write applications without fear of censorship. The spirit of the garage-based startup lives." In response, Apple CEO Steve Jobs will order Time's iPad app to be removed from the App Store.
Rupert Murdoch's "The Daily" debuts. Both subscribers are extremely satisfied.
In August, after months of crushing losses, The Daily Beast/Newsweek folds. In November, Howard Kurtz stops filing stories.
Glenn Beck shoots at two black helicopters hovering near his home, killing a Medevac pilot and a Fox 5 traffic babe.
Katie Couric steps down as anchor of CBS Evening News to join 60 Minutes, lowering the average correspondent age by 28 years. Kim Kardashian assumes Couric's role reading the news.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, on trial in Sweden, is asked by prosecutor where he pays taxes. "None of your beeswax," Assange replies.
On March 1, Steve Jobs introduces the iPatch, a tablet designed for content piracy. More than 30 million units sold on first day.
On April 1, 100 million iPatches explode, maiming the entire US population between 15 and 29.
Fearing revenue declines at its Kaplan Education subsidiary, the Washington Post Co. buys 49 percent of the Mafia.
Comcast, under FCC scrutiny for first time, sells NBC Universal to Barry Diller. Tina Brown brought in to run it.
Paul Krugman loses his sense of outrage. Universe contracts.
Editor's Note: We're wrapping up 2010 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring. Today, our predictor is Jason Fry, a familiar byline at the Lab. Jason also prognosticated earlier this week about the potential success of the NYT paywall.
Hyperlocal will remain stubbornly small scale. Large-scale efforts at cracking hyperlocal will seed more news organizations with content, but that content will remain mostly aggregation and data and still feel robotic and cold. Meanwhile, small-scale hyperlocal efforts will continue to win reader loyalty, but struggle to monetize those audiences. By the end of 2011, the most promising developments in hyperlocal will come from social media. Promising efforts to identify and leverage localized news and conversation in social media will be the buzz of late 2011, and we'll be excited to think that social media is proving an excellent stepping stone to greater involvement in our physical communities.
Google will deal the content farms a big blow by tweaking its algorithms to drive down their search rankings. But the company will be opaque to the point of catatonia about exactly what it did and why it did it, reflecting its reluctance to be drawn into qualitative judgments about content. There will be talk of lawsuits by the spurned content farms and no small amount of jawing about Google's power, lack of transparency, and whether or not it's being evil. But even those worried about Google's actions will admit that search is a much better experience now that results are less cluttered with horribly written crap.
Tablets will carve out a number of interesting niches, from favored input device of various specialists to device you like to curl up with on the couch. But these will be niches: The open web will remain as robust as ever, and be the killer app of the tablet just like it is everywhere else. News organizations' walled-garden apps will win some converts, and apps in general will continue to point to promising new directions in digital design, but there will be no massive inflows of app revenue to news organizations. This will be seen as a failure by folks who got too excited in the first place.
Facebook will further cement its dominance by beginning to focus on ways to extract and preserve moments that matter to us from the ceaseless flow of the news feed, building on its photo-archiving role to also become a personal archive of beloved status updates, exchanges, links, and other material. The most promising startups and efforts from established social media companies will center around creating quiet water that draws from the river of news without leaving us overwhelmed by the current.
Below are predictions from Susan Orlean, Joe Grimm, Matt Haughey, Adrian Holovaty, Megan McCarthy, Mark Potts, Jake Shapiro, and Cody Brown.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we'll be talking about in 2011. We'll share those results in a couple days.
We'll be reading more on our phones, our iPads, and our Super Scout Decoder rings by the end of next year.
Several magazines — maybe Time or Newsweek or both — will go monthly and/or digital only. But there will be new magazine startups in print that will be luxurious and expensive and book-like. 2011 will be the year of those two forms making themselves distinct; things on line will become more webby, and print publications will become more "collectible" and classic.
Journalism schools will offer a "web producer" major.
The last typewriter living in the wild will be captured, its DNA sequenced; and then it will be humanely destroyed.
In 2011, I expect to see some shakeout of traditional and innovative newsrooms. Some of the new ones will have hit the wall that tells them they don't have the right model to go forward. Legacy newsrooms seem to gaining traction with digital advertising and are feeling some traditional advertisers come back, but they have been substantially weakened and devalued. With the amount of cash that is sitting idle, I expect we will see some acquisitions among traditional media companies. The prize in those deals will be the content parts of the operations, of course. I would not surprised if some traditional newsrooms are absorbed by digital companies looking to build credibly news-oriented footprints fast.
Watch Yahoo! and Facebook in 2011 to see how they try to grow their reputations as news sources.
Mobile and tablets will continue to boom, with some shakeout among devices and a real gold rush to build apps, backed up by original news and news aggregation. Individualized services or services curated by friends will grow.
Whether or not the Gawker suite of sites redesign is successful or not, the rest of the New York media blog world will follow suit and copy the new direction for layout, because big business blogging is basically a cargo cult where everyone does what Gawker is doing since that seems to be successful for them (in the hopes it is successful for them).
This is sort of a half-prediction and half-hope, but I'd love to see the self-publishing pendulum start to shift the other way, from centralized services (like Twitter and AOL before it) back to a beautiful diversity of decentralized/independent tools and services like we had in the "golden age" of blogging. We've seen some occasional banter about this over the last few years, but I think people are going to get more serious about it in 2011, and certainly by the end of 2012.
Oh, and Google is totally the new Microsoft. I can see that being a theme of 2011.
The convergence of the media and technology industries will continue. Consumer-facing technology companies will start to encroach onto traditional media territories, and media companies will realize that they need to invest more into technology in order to compete with the tech companies entering their space. There will be more tech/media partnerships like the one between Betaworks and the New York Times, but there will be a struggle to see which side — tech or media — comes out on top. The real winners will be developers, executives, and small sites that straddle both worlds.
Mobile access to the web will become more reliable, especially if the iPhone heads to another carrier (like Verizon) as has been predicted. A spike in smartphones will bring an obvious spike in mobile views. Apps will still be important, but, as mobile OSes multiply, the smarter move might be towards mobile-friendly websites that work across platforms (like http://mediagazer.com/m)
Traditional web advertising will still be a mess, yet there will be substantial resistance to changing the model. There will be too much emphasis put on metrics that no one actually knows how to measure. Pageviews will become more and more meaningless, but people will still chase them, like rainbows, hoping to find that pot of gold.
Oh, and there will be more robot/cyborg/machine involvement in media, and it will be a good thing. Algorithms are not the enemy!
A continuing explosion of blogs covering local communities and local interests, written by passionate community members whose coverage and audience engagement far outstrips what can be managed by corporately backed local interlopers like Patch. Key to these efforts, though, will be the bloggers and local site operators getting serious about tapping their share of the $130 billion local-advertising market. At the same time, the rise in location-aware mobile services will begin ushering in a new generation of targeted local coverage and information in the palm of readers' hands. Mobile is local, and I suspect we'll see the first breakthrough, wildly popular local mobile product in the next year or so.
Apple will change its tune on one-click donations to nonprofits and public media.
Public broadcasting will emerge from its existential crisis (Juan Williams fiasco and defunding threats) as a more focused, collaborative, and inclusive "public media" industry, reasserting a central role in sustaining journalism and leading innovation.
The Public Media Platform will launchand catalyze more collaboration and innovation, expanding beyond the borders of public radio and TV.
News orgs will start leveraging Mechanical Turk and other crowd-powered services to help manage overwhelming data needs.
"Private" social media websites like Path are going to boom. Sites that see privacy as a value as opposed to an antiquated social norm are going to go big. I don't think Path is actually that great, but they are in the right space.
WikiLeaks will leak a government document that outlines strategies to assassinate Julian Assange.
Gawker will buy then break a story that starts a war.
Today, our predictor is Jonathan Stray, interactive technology editor for the Associated Press and a familiar byline here at the Lab. His subject: the building of new multi-source information products, and whether it'll be news organizations that do the building.
2011 will be the year that news organizations finally start talking about integrated products designed to serve the complete information needs of consumers, but it won't be the year that they ship them.
News used to be more or less whatever news organizations published and broadcast. With so many other ways to find out about the world, this is no longer the case. Professional journalism has sometimes displayed an antagonistic streak towards blogs, Wikipedia, and social media of all types, but it's no longer possible to deny that non-journalism sources of news are exciting and useful to people.
Unencumbered by such tribalism — and lacking content creation behemoths of their own — the information technology industry has long understood the value of curating multiple sources, including traditional news content. Google web search was the first truly widespread digital public information system. RSS allowed readers to assemble their own news feeds. Mid-decade, Wikipedia exploded into the one of the top ten sites on the web, used as much for news as for reference. The business practices of news aggregators angered publishers, but there's no getting around the fact that they are tremendously useful tools. The most recent change in information distribution is social. Twitter has become an entirely new form of news network, while Facebook wants media organizations to use their social infrastructure to reach users.
But as of yet, there are few integrated products. Flipboard comes closest with its slick integration of socially filtered news, and now they've announced collaborations with several news organizations for seamless delivery of professional content — the user no longer has to open a link in the browser to read an article from, say, The Washington Post. Flipboard aims to be the starting point for my exploration of the news, whereas a news product that refuses to provide me with high-quality filtering and curation of the rest of the world's information will only ever be an endpoint, a place I might arrive rather than the place I start from.
In 2011, news organizations will finally start to realize that they need to be in the business of serving the consumer's information needs, not just producing content, and any tool that allows them to serve those needs is fair game. There's no getting around the fact that integrated products are beloved by users; this is part of the appeal of Google's and Apple's offerings. And being loved by users is essential, regardless of whether your revenue strategy is advertising, subscriptions, or philanthropy.
This is also about being multi-platform. One of the great things about Facebook is that I can access it fluidly on any device; Facebook isn't a website, it's a product. So far, no news organization really offers a seamless experience across platforms. Several are aiming for it, CNN is pretty good at it, and the Huffington Post and The New York Times are not far behind. But I suspect that the industry will slowly discover that multi-platform will not be enough to compete with multi-platform and multi-source. I expect to eventually to see much more incorporation of search and social content, and many more syndication deals.
This is a discussion that I expect will enter into the mainstream of the journalism business by the year's end. But I don't think the news industry will release any truly competitive integrated products in 2011. Flipboard and other startups will pick up most of that slack, and it will be a few more years before most news organizations complete the organizational and philosophical changes they need to compete successfully.
We also want to hear your predictions: Take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we'll be talking about in 2011. We'll share those results later this week.
Here's Matt Thompson, he of Newsless, Snarkmarket, and NPR fame.
At some point in the near future, automatic speech transcription will become fast, free, and decent. And this moment — let's call it the Speakularity — will be a watershed moment for journalism.
So much of the raw material of journalism consists of verbal exchanges — phone conversations, press conferences, meetings. One of journalism's most significant production challenges, even for those who don't work at a radio company, is translating these verbal exchanges into text to weave scripts and stories out of them.
After the Speakularity, much more of this raw material would become available. It would render audio recordings accessible to the blind and aid in translation of audio recordings into different languages. Obscure city meetings could be recorded and auto-transcribed; interviews could be published nearly instantly as Q&As; journalists covering events could focus their attention on analyzing rather than capturing the proceedings.
Because text is much more scannable than audio, recordings automatically indexed to a transcript would be much quicker to search through and edit. Jon Stewart's crew for The Daily Show uses expensive technology to process and search through the hundreds of hours of video the various news programs air each week. Imagine if that capability were opened up to citizens — if every on-air utterance of every pundit, politician, or policy wonk were searchable on Google.
The likeliest path to the Speakularity runs through Google. The company has already taken significant steps in this direction. They've trained their speech processing algorithms through the millions of queries submitted to Google 411, so that now, my Android phone is already pretty good at recognizing my voice commands. They automatically add captions to YouTube videos and transcribe voicemails through Google Voice. Developers can already call on Google's voice recognition system when developing apps for Android devices.
The Speakularity itself probably won't happen in 2011, but I think a key moment might. Let's say that sometime in 2011, Google unveils a product called Google Transcribe. Not for charity, of course; better transcription = more relevant ads. The core of the product is a speech transcription API: send it audio and get back text in return. But there's a front end to Transcribe where non-techies can get their mp3s auto-transcribed. Crucially, that app allows the user to manually correct the transcription (highlight a passage and it plays automatically), enabling a human feedback loop that makes the machine better and better over time. In addition to captioning, YouTube videos appear by default next to an automatically generated transcript that users can use for navigation, Debate-Viewer-style.
Constant social feedback plus machine learning could improve automatic speech transcription to the point where it's finally ready for prime time. And when it does, the default expectation for recorded speech will be that it's searchable and readable, nearly in the instant. I know this sounds totally retrograde, but I think it's something like the future.
Below are predictions from Paul Bass, John Paton, Philip Balboni, Martin Moore, Mark Luckie, Adrian Monck, Ken Doctor, Keith Hopper, and Vivian Schiller.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we'll be talking about in 2011. We'll share those results later this week.
Every city of 100,000 or more in America will have its own online-only daily local news site.
Local governments will create their own "news" sources online to try to control the message and compete with new media and compensate for the decline of old media channels.
Newspapers, TV and radio stations, and online news outlets will collaborate on a bigger scale on local coverage and events
"Local" takes center stage in online news, as newspaper sites, Patch, Yahoo, NPR member stations and new start ups (not for profit and for profit) form alliances, grow, and compete for audience and revenue online.
Twitter and Facebook become established as journalism platforms for newsgathering, distribution and engagement.
In-car Internet radio becomes a hot media topic, though penetration of enabled cars will lag by a few years.
One of bigger things to move in 2011 will be triggered by emerging, seamless connectivity in the car. The historical limitations of satellite radio have obscured the real potential here. We will see a revolution in how news is presented on the go if auto manufacturers get past their inevitable awkward attempts and are able to streamline the user experience. I fully expect in-dash app stores and additional inspiration for distracted driver legislation that goes well beyond basic audio news. On the positive side, engaged news consumers will never fall asleep at the wheel again.
2011 will be a seminal year for the reinvention of the business of American journalism — especially notable for the continued maturation of the new generation of online only news sites: the Huffington Post, Politico, GlobalPost, Daily Beast, and others. With The New York Times paving the way for monetizing one of America's most visited and highly regarded general news sites, 2011 should be the year we can point to as a game-changer for online revenue generation by charging consumers for high quality news content and the beginning of the movement away from sole reliance on selling page views and ad impressions.
In 2011 we will see the return of legacy news media. Chastened by the mistakes of the past, the legacy companies will be more nimble and eager to pursue Digital First solutions. And armed with their billions in revenue and new outsourcing solutions to drive down legacy media costs they will be much better resourced financially to compete with online news start-ups. The New Year will prove difficult for online start-ups like Huffington Post, et al to drive towards sustainability and profitability. Look for consolidation between the old and new worlds.
We have been stupid and slow to change but we are changing. We still count our revenue in the billions and that gives us so much more in the way of resources compared to the startups. Smart plus money is an advantage. We are getting smarter.
The power of news organisations to dictate the news agenda will decline further as peer-to-peer and algorithm driven editorial recommendations grow in influence.
Those news organisations that develop sophisticated skills to clean, structure and filter data quickly will gain significant competitive advantage over those who don't.
With the recent upswing in the availability of media jobs, I predict those journalists who developed a substantial online presence, created unique digital journalism projects, or who were at the forefront of the digital journalism conversation during the course of their unemployment, will return to newsrooms with zeal and newfound perspective, if they so choose. They will re-invigorate those news operations who are actively seeking employees who will help move journalism forward (and hopefully they will get a relatively larger paycheck in the process).
Julian Assange will be mired in a court case.
The infrastructure of the Internet which made free speech briefly freer will increasingly marginalize and muzzle it.
A handful of diplomats will get HuffPo columns on the back of their cable writing prowess.
Drone strikes will continue to dully but effectively kill more men, women and children by accident, recklessness or negligence than document dumps. The public will remain indifferent.
Xinhua will have its "CNN moment" and emerge as a global reporting force on a key international story.
Western media will increase reporting partnerships with Chinese media.
Business news networks will look to hire mainland Chinese talent.
Piers Morgan will be a critical success on CNN, but not a popular one.
Jeff Jarvis will put BuzzMachine behind a paywall.
2011 is the year of The New Trifecta. The convergence of mobile, social and video on the tablet defines the new platform as a unique consumer experience yielding, consequently, new business models. No longer are mobile, social and video "categories" of content or revenue lines, but powerful forces that when brought together redefine the news reading and viewing experience. That's one big reason we're seeing significantly higher-than-online time-on-session tablet data.
Social media optimization will grow in 2011. Almost organically, social referrals (mainly Facebook and Twitter) have become the fastest growing source of news traffic. News publishers can now count 5-15 percent of their traffic sent from social, making search/Google referrals less important. In addition, social referrals convert better ("qualified" social leads) in obtaining new, continuing customers. The next big question: If this is happening without much publisher work, what kind of work would further harness the social juice?
Growth in the company year will be mainly digital. There are few signs the old print business is coming back, and this year's single-digit decreases in print advertising looks like it will continue into next. That means digital revenue — online advertising generally, new tablet ad revenue and digital reader revenue — is the only hope for building a future for legacy companies.
One of the common threads through many of their predictions was mobile — the impact smartphones and tablets and apps will have on how news is reported, produced, distributed, and consumed. (Not to mention how it's paid for.) Here are Vivian Schiller, Keith Hopper, Jakob Nielsen, Alexis Madrigal, Michael Andersen, Richard Lee Colvin, Megan McCarthy, David Cohn, and David Fanning on what 2011 will bring for the mobile space.
After two decades of saying that "this is the year of mobile," 2011 really will be the year of mobile.
My wild prediction: 2011 will be the year of media initiatives that serve poor and middle-income people.
For 20 years, almost all native Internet content has been made for the niche interests — often the professional interests — of people who make more than the median household income of $50,000 or so. But one of the best things about the mobile Internet is that it's finally killing (or even reversing) the digital divide.
Poor folks may not have broadband, but they've got cell phones. African Americans and Latinos are more likely than white people to use phones for the web, pictures, texts, emails, games, videos, and social networking. As hardware prices keep falling, we'll see more and more demand for information that is useful to the lower-income half of the population — and thanks to low marginal costs, people will be creating products that fill that need. It's about damn time, wouldn't you say?
Murdoch's iPad Daily will be surprisingly successful. I say it gets mid-six figure subscribers by the end of the year.
The iPad newspaper will launch and, while it won't fall flat on its face, it will be exactly what is described at the end of EPIC 2015 — a newsletter for the elite. Odd that it will be digital but suffer the end fate of newspapers as described in that video.
I predict smartphone penetration will break 50 percent in the U.S., creating a tipping point in mobile web traffic. The web folks will then finally wake up and smell the mobile. Ubiquitous support for HTML5 and geolocation will sweeten the deal, and we'll see some exciting new news experiences delivering proximally-relevant immediacy to your mobile devices in 2011.
The cost of creating dedicated apps for mobile phones and iPads will continue to fall and some news executives may conclude that the apps are an end in themselves, and that they can continue to provide their audiences with the same content they've always given them. But it will become clear over the next 12 months that delivering old, worn content in a new package will not be enough to keep traditional news organizations profitable over the long term.
1. Growth in for-pay content.
2. Strong growth in mobile content.
3. Mobile often means short, so need to find ways to be interesting and brief beyond simply being snarky.
iPad magazines/newspapers will figure out a way to display across platforms or else they be considered an elite novelty.
The tablet reader — the iPad et al — is the big game-changer. Not only is it going to revitalize print and launch an exciting new era of editorial design and execution, it is the real promise of convergence we've been talking about for so long. It's going to be a wonderful challenge to create the new publications. It's also a device that seems to offer a subscription or pay model that is quite natural and acceptable to readers and viewers.
For Frontline it is the bright hope. As broadcast appointment viewing declines, we've seen more and more viewers go to our website (we've been streaming our films since 2000), but also worried that with shorter and shorter attention spans, we were sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Now I can see a future for this idea we've defended for so long — intelligent narrative documentary journalism — and it's on my lap. I can comfortably watch at length without a twitchy finger on a mouse threatening to pull me away. I can pause and see the film wrapped together with the best of literary journalism. I can experience the resurgence of great documentary photography, and of course I can connect to the living, pulsing web (if I have to). I can decide to throw my film up onto my widescreen TV, and sit back and watch, but most of all, I will have it all on my virtual bookshelf. That means I will have to be making journalism that lasts, that is not disposable, that is so well made it's worth keeping. It'll sit next to my ebooks; in fact it will be a form of ebook.
As magazine publishers rush onto this new platform, photographers and filmmakers are already embedding their video in the pages. Books like Sebastian Junger's War are scattering short pieces of video actuality in the narrative, and there is at least one chapter that is a longer mini-documentary, on Sal Giunta, the Medal of Honor winner. But these are more illustrations than longer narrative works. Our challenge at Frontline will be to publish our longer films and embed within them other terrific journalism that both echoes and complements our stories. That's going to be fun to design and edit.
So this new technology, the tablet, will expand our editorial horizons, force us to make new partnerships, collaborate with more writers and photographers, and find ways to invent a new kind of publication, while holding onto some old ideas about the appeal and strength of good journalism.
Below are predictions from Bob Giles, Alan Murray, David Beard, Geneva Overholser, Alan D. Mutter, Melissa Ludtke, Brooke Kroeger, Jan Schaffer, and Ory Okolloh.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we'll be talking about in 2011. We'll share those results later this week.
Newspaper companies will regret the deep cutting of newsgathering resources as the economy recovers and advertisers conclude that local newspapers are no longer vital sources of community coverage. Moreover, newspapers will follow their historical pattern of being slow to adapt to what's new — in this case, opportunities offered by the iPad and other tablets.
This will be the year when collaboration finally, truly, really takes hold. Smart legacy media leaders will determine what they and they alone can do best, then ally themselves with others who can supply the rest. Radio, TV, web-based publications, print publications, bloggers, international and national news providers, journalism schools, nonprofits, and commercial media — the smart ones will figure out their niche and how to partner (strategically) with others to be sure their work is seen. The public will be the biggest beneficiary.
This will be the year we finally realize how big a mistake it was to relinquish our time-honored aversion to anonymity when we went on the web. Having been persuaded that we had to adapt to the culture we were joining, we lost one of the key distinctions that differentiates journalism from other info sources. Bring naming names back, and vanquish the trolls!
1. The emergence of a great WebSocket live-blogger: working from livecasts, using text on the right rail, an articulate, knowledgeable, irreverent commenter can deconstruct and add background as events go on, in a step up from current chat technology. Others might employ VH1 Pop-Up Video or Mystery Science Theater 3000 styles, with fact bubbles on livecasts.
2. A really organized Twitter wire service — or a use of Twitter for a really valuable compilation that might move beyond a Twitter list or paper.li. A favorite of mine for journalists — Muck Rack Daily.
2011 will be the year of the tablet — dozens of them coming out, and some might even be good. Because each one requires a different build, it may also be the year in which the techies outnumber the journalists!
But 2011 won't be the year of WebTV. Cable companies can't hold back the tide forever — but they can hold it back for a few more years.
The major trends to watch in 2011 will be same as those we saw this year — just more intense:
Mobile: A growing amount of information will be consumed on smartphones and tablets vs. PCs, laptops, TV, radio, or print. Static content will feel stiff, suffocating, and subliminally inauthentic in an age of near-epidemic skepticism toward almost every institution of society — particularly the media.
Transactional: Consumers actively will shop for news, entertainment, commercial information, and, of course, actual goods and services. As they gain confidence in themselves and their peers to judge everything from Federal Reserve policy to the best place for a burrito, the time, attention, and importance they attach to conventional news and advertising will decline.
Social: Facebook, YouTube, WikiLeaks, and other consumer-driven media will assert greater control over what is covered, how it's covered and what it means. (See also: "Don't touch my junk.") News, entertainment, and advertising are destined to increasingly blur together into something you might call info-tainment-ising. The shrinking authority of conventional news and advertising in this environment will devalue legacy media and commercial brands.
Denial: Deeply invested in their traditionally lucrative business models, legacy media companies for the most part will not move fast enough to create fresh news, entertainment, and advertising products to respond to the prodigiously empowered, self-actuated consumer. If the mainstream media companies continue to nibble cautiously around the edges of innovation, then dozens of daring competitors will merrily fill the void to build shockingly efficient businesses to poach what's left of the once-fat legacy franchises.
The word "new" will show up less and less as an attached-at-the-hip adjective describing media.
What constitutes "value" in the work journalists do will be a question much pondered — with answers leading to greater awareness of its essential contextual and curatorial role in the era of information overload.
Redesigns in newsrooms' seating plans will happen more often as editors mesh the tech folks with the journalists and find ways they can work together to feed news and information to the web, mobile phones, tablets, and print — and do so with storytelling techniques offering greater visual appeal.
The word "eyeballs" will send ones like "circulation" and "subscription" to the same place where typewriters now reside.
Audience fragmentation will continue apace, while at the same time media and tech powerhouses will look to consolidate their influence by acquiring social-media pieces they don't already have.
Collaboration will be the new competition. News startups within metro areas and between metro areas will increasingly work together to share content, trade links, connect silos and possible seek group support.
The conversation about sustaining news startups will move beyond ad sales and into such possibilities as stewardship models for journalism.
More statewide investigative news startups will launch.
We will begin to develop a deeper conversation about innovations in journalism itself, not just the delivery systems for journalism.
Alas, 2011 will not be the year we divine the ultimate profit, nonprofit, and/or combination model for sustaining high quality journalism. But by December, we will know substantially more than we do now about what does — and does not — have real potential to work.
Wikileaks/Cablegate will remind us of the important curation role that journalists/newspapers play and will encourage more collaborative and investigative journalism based on open data.
Over the next few days, you'll hear from Steve Brill, Vivian Schiller, Michael Schudson, Markos Moulitsas, Kevin Kelly, Geneva Overholser, Adrian Holovaty, Jakob Nielsen, Evan Smith, Megan McCarthy, David Fanning, Matt Thompson, Bob Garfield, Matt Haughey, and more.
We also want to hear your predictions: take our Lab reader poll and tell us what you think we'll be talking about in 2011. We'll share those results later this week.
To start off our package of predictions, here's Clay Shirky. Happy holidays.
The old news business model has had a series of shocks in the 15 or so years we've had a broadly adopted public web. The first was the loss of geographic limits to competition (every outlet could reach any reader, listener or viewer). Next was the loss of progressive layers of advertising revenue (the rise of Monster and craigslist et alia, as well as the "analog dollars to digital dimes" problem). Then there is the inability to charge readers easily without eviscerating the advertising rate-base (the failure of micropayments and paywalls as general-purpose solutions).
Next up for widespread disruption, I think, is syndication, a key part of the economic structure of the news business since the founding of Havas in the early 19th century. As with so many parts of a news system based on industrial economics, that model is now under pressure.
As Jonathan Stray pointed out in "The Google/China Hacking Case" and Nick Carr pointed out in "Google in the Middle," the numerator of organizations producing original news is tiny — absolutely tiny — compared to the denominator of those re-publishing that news. Stray notes that only 7 of the 121 outlets running the China story were based mainly on original reporting, while the vast majority was just wire service copy. Carr similarly pointed out that Google news showed 11,264 separate outlets for the Somali pirate story in 2009, almost all of them re-running the same couple of stories. (I was similarly surprised, last year, to discover that syndicated content outweighed locally created content in my old hometown paper by a 2:1 margin.)
The idea that syndication should be different in a digital era has been around for a while now. Jeff Jarvis's formulation — "Do what you do best and link to the rest" — dates from 2007, and the AP started talking about about holding back some stories from subscribers in order to drive their PageRank up last year. What could make 2011 the year of general restructuring is Google's attempt to give credit where credit is due, in the words of their blog post, by offering tags that identify original and preferred sources for syndicated stories.
This kind of linking, traffic driving, and credit are natively web-like ideas, but they are also inimical to the older logic of syndication. Put simply, syndication makes little sense in a world with URLs. When news outlets were segmented by geography, having live human beings sitting around in ten thousand separate markets deciding which stories to pull off the wire was a service. Now it's just a cost.
Giving credit where credit is due will reward original work, whether scoops, hot news, or unique analysis or perspective. This will be great for readers. It may not, however, be so great for newspapers, or at least not for their revenues, because most of what shows up in a newspaper isn't original or unique. It's the first four grafs of something ripped off the wire and lightly re-written, a process repeated countless times a day with no new value being added to the story.
Taken to its logical conclusion, giving credit where credit is due will mean things like 11,260 or so outlets getting out of the business or re-running the same three versions of the Somali pirate story. If Reuters has the best version, why shouldn't people just read it from Reuters?
Like other forces brought to bear by the web, there's no getting around this one — rewards for originality are what we want, not just as consumers but as citizens — but creating an environment that generates those rewards will also mean dismantling the syndication model we've had since Havas first set up shop.
"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
"Basically the price of a night on the town!"
"I'd love to help kickstart continued development! And 0 EUR/month really does make fiscal sense too...

subset: commoncrawl