I attended the
DaVinci institute's, "Night with a Futurist" meeting last night featuring Stephen Keating. Mr. Keating is currently the business editor of The Denver Post. While I think he had some good insights into what newspapers can do to extend their lives into the next generation of news creation and delivery, he failed to acknowledge that news organizations will be replaced as intermediary (both from a filtering and delivery sense) by smart filtering and personalization technology that began with Yahoo and has been taken over more recently by Google. News organizations could end up becoming purely content creation and distribution into multiple (smart filter) channels. This is similar role that recording companies play in the record industry, or movie studios to the film industry.
Mr. Keating began the evening by reviewing the
EPIC 2014 flash video, that predicts the death of the New York Times out in 2014, replaced by a behemoth organization labeled "Googlezon" (resulting from the merger of Google and Amazon in 2008) and begins to seize control of distribution, filtering, and personalization of all information in the universe.
He then went on to describe the size of the advertising market ($424 billion globally) and that newspapers have roughly 30% of this market. So newspapers still own a major chunk of this market and new media is whittling away at this chunk every year. What news papers have going for them are three things: authority, brand, and content as well as an organization that knows how to manage all three components.
Perhaps I'm being unfair in my opinion of the talk. Mr. Keating does believe that the delivery of news is undergoing transformation on a major scale, but stops short of declaring the model broken and proposing a completely new solution. I agree with his main thesis that the three important components that get people to pay attention (in our attention economy):
authority,
brand, and
content. However I would argue that "
authority" equates to "people we trust". I get the majority of pointers to information today from emails and the blogs I read, and podcasts I subscribe to. These are my personal
brands and
authorities all rolled into one. I listen to NPR on the way in to work, look through digg, and scan a news widget that sits on my desktop during the day as my second tier of news and news pointers. My third and local tier is my local television media. As for content, this is your personal aggregation point on the desktop. Right now that is a mishmash of web apps, RSS readers, and podcast tuners.
The talent management and content distribution (indexing) should resolve itself in the current dead tree media shake out. The content filtering and desktop delivery are dead center in the
attention economy problem space and I believe will be solved by a number of targeted vertical filters and some general search engines strung together with a much smarter reader/listener/writer than current RSS readers are capable of. These
Content Tuners will act as proxies to the various filtering services and provide personalization and collaborative filtering on the front-end to learn the tastes and preferences of their masters.
The content king is dead, long live the personalized information filter and aggregator.
