stroemberg

This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.

The common adversary is the telecom industry. It’s an industry being undermined by the technological change of mobile computing and its profits are up for grabs. Apple and Google have different approaches in implementing this change but in the end they dismantle and absorb profits from the same target.

As West put it, news organizations typically create a disconnect between the people who provide content and the people who discuss that content. This inhibits quality conversation.

According to the BBC, or an editor I talked to there, for people who go to the BBC News website, they on average read 2.5 stories. That’s what a typical visit is: read two or three stories, then go someplace else. Whereas for people who use the BBC iPad app, it’s about six and a half stories. There are similar numbers for National Public Radio, for The New York Times, and others. And this sort of deeper engagement is something news organizations really need to harness.

Whereas I think a lot of news organizations this year are going to start seeing that if they want to be the one source of news for their customers, or the primary source of news for their customers, they’re going to need to present more of the world and more of the online world, and that aggregation of pulling things together will be something they will buy into more.

That’s right. You’re no longer a “user”, a hateful term if ever one were invented, or a “visitor,” or a brother from another digital planet. Overnight, you’re a customer again.

And that’s logical, of course; the most common complaint against digital news being its chaotic nature (and, for that matter, the most commonly accepted assumption about it being that we need better filters to keep it coherent), topic-based journalism makes sense. But it also has a side effect: Because we choose, essentially, topic over time as journalism’s core ordering principle, we don’t generally think about time as an order unto itself. Newness, and nowness, become our default settings, and our default objectives. The “tyranny of recency,” Thompson calls it.

And yet we want perspective; we want to give the public a sense of the relative significance of our stories. So we’ve hacked a workaround: a code of assumption embedded in the stories we tell, a language whose grammar is visual (headline size, font) and whose syntax is graphical (page location).

A magazine app must swim to the top of several hundred thousand other applications. And even in the context of a dedicated magazine store, the publisher won’t control featuring. The value of the brand must pull the consumer through to the purchase. And brands are expensive to build and nurture. So the publisher will continue to bear a high marketing cost to ensure enough sales for a stable level of circulation, just as they do today in the offline world.

On top of that, you could create a system whereby the more you share, the less you pay. Let’s say I was a tastemaker—where not only do I have a big following, but people like to engage on what I point them to. If you’re a publication, you actually want to give me that article for free, so that I can tell others to view it. If you make it transparent, and even layer on some gaming aspects that take quality of link sharing into consideration, you could incentivize people in an interesting way.

According to Webster’s, serendipity is “the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for.” So if the essence of serendipity is chance or fortune or chaos, then by definition, anything that a search engine brings to you, even on spec, isn’t serendipitous.

Journalism must be fed — but inky hands will be doing less and less of the feeding.

The Times’ planned paid-content metering system, for instance, is a nervous-making strategy for a company with relatively little margin of error. Compare that to the revenue trajectories that News Corp.’s London papers may see after their paywalls have been in place for a year. Whatever the results, they’ll have de minimis impact to News Corp. fortunes.

The non-news revenues may be a surprise, but here’s one further fact to ponder: News, over the past several years, has continued to decline in its percentage contribution to most diversified companies.

Apps will be a good vector for complex writings (quantum mechanic vs. celebrity gossip) even though compulsive foragers will blame the impossibility to comment, share, propagate, squabble around contents.