Death of the Newspaper: Birth of the Lifestream?
Michael Barnwell May 8, 2009
The twilight of an industry. (image via Clern)
The talk about the inevitable death of newspapers seems to have heated up in recent weeks. Overall, there seems to be a resignation setting in about their demise.
Major Losses in the News
Just the other day, Warren Buffet discouraged investing ever again in newspapers. (The New York Times lost $74.5 million in the first quarter.) And on May 4th, remarks from President Obama’s Press Secretary Robert Gibbs gave no sign that there were any plans for the government to step in to save such a lowly thing as newspapers.
Buffet’s business partner Charlie Munger called the impending loss of newspapers a national tragedy. What this tragedy is akin to, if indeed it’s a tragedy, is hard to say just yet. So far, the hopeful replacements to the newspaper like the digital book readers the Kindle DX and Sony Reader don’t seem like the splendid new alternative, so for those grieving the impending loss, the mourning period will probably be extensive.
Enter the Lifestream
On another thread in the commentary on the ailing press, at the end of an extensive roundtable conversation published not long ago on Edge.org, David Gelernter, the visionary behind cloud computing, was asked the blunt question, “How do you save the New York Times?” (”Lord of the Cloud,” a roundtable with David Gelernter, John Markoff, and Clay Shirky.)
His response, while not giving much hope to the continued existence of the “printed page,” assured the Times of the value of their professional service. The service Gerlernter describes probably sounds pretty familiar to anyone with a bit of knowledge about how newspaper editors work—they sort out the important stories and tell you they’re important by putting them on prominent pages.
Using Gelernter’s term, a “lifestream producer” would sort and place the news on the “lifestream,” a digital time continuum of sorts, there to be plucked by the reader whenever it’s convenient or relevant to read. The reader would also be able to go back in time to trace the evolution of stories or take a peek in the future to see what lies ahead.
Make Way for Content Strategy
This, of course, would be good news for editors. Their duties would pretty much be the same, but they’d be given extra powers to shape or orchestrate how news is received across time. Editors wouldn’t be working alone, naturally. Journalists would still need to write or film the stories, and, most important, editors would be assisted by an intelligent software agent to help in sifting the relevance of the news and discovering related stories, whether transparent or obscure. Overall, this enhanced, or reconsidered, role of the editor strikes me as one of the bright prospects for figuring out how news organizations can carry on.
I hope that it almost goes without saying that a content strategist would have a significant role, too, in maintaining the smooth functioning and insightfulness of the digital lifestream. In fact, content strategy has long been interested in the relational sphere of stories. With the advent of a lifestream, this abiding interest could be entwined with a reader’s own interest in gaining a historical sense of things.
To Skim or Swim
One more bright note to mention in the press battle is a curious statistic also found near the end of the Edge.org roundtable. Readers of the New York Times in print, it turns out, spend an average of 35 minutes a day with the paper, while online readers of the Times spend just 32 minutes—a month. That puts the monthly average for the print reader at 17 ½ hours. What in the world are they doing all that time? Sudoku? They’re certainly not just skimming headlines. Of course, this statistic doesn’t tell the whole story—who knows what else the online readers are doing to get their news. But it does say that there’s an audience of newsreaders who have 35 minutes a day to pore over the events of our times. How long they would spend on the lifestream reading news, watching videos, seeing ads is yet to be seen, but I imagine it would be longer than a minute a day.
It’s always interesting to encounter people who are just discovering journalism but think they’ve discovered something new. Because everything described in the so-called “lifestream” has been available for about 100 years at something called “the public library.” For a century or more (since Eugene Power perfected the use of microfilm for storage in the publishing business), microfilmed book and newspaper archives have served this purpose. More recently, thank goodness, it’s all gotten a lot more convenient through the magic of digital. Now, the library comes to you. Tracing a story back through the archives and then forward in time (and sideways through links to related topics) is easier on the web, but not materially different. What still needs fixing—in print and on the web—is the way all this is funded, which is something we currently call advertising. As we’re fond of pointing out at postadvertising.com, journalism isn’t broken, advertising is. Better to devote attention to fixing the funding.
While the concept of the lifestream and the evolved notion of newspaper accessibility, from microfilm to digital file, do have common traits, the experience of the lifestream is fundamentally different from what’s currently available at the public library and therefore worthy of the label “new.”
What’s missing in the library model is the intervention of an editor who curates the news (often up to the minute), the participation of users who comment upon the news stories and even add their own, and, not least, the implementation of software that tracks usage, extracts less obvious relations to suggest further reading, and pinpoints the prime stories through such criteria as relevancy and popularity. The lifestream also offers the benefit of illustrating the entire ecosystem of a news story in engaging, graphic form. Taken together, these extra traits have the potential to offer a compelling experience for readers.
Finding funding for a compelling experience that has multitudes of engaged readers doesn’t strike me as daunting challenge. In what ways advertisers might fund this experience is yet to be seen, but if the lifestream could be realized most of the heavy lifting would be done.
You write:
“That puts the monthly average for the print reader at 17 ½ hours. What in the world are they doing all that time? Sudoku?”
It’s called reading the newspaper. A pleasure that the distracted digerati don’t seem to understand or value.
Sadly, true reading, as opposed to skimming bulleted text (and entirely too long blog entries) is dying along with newspapers.
I value journalism. I favor reading more, not less. Sadly, ironic tones in blog posts (long or otherwise) are often missed. (I hope you weren’t skimming.) The point of the post was to imagine how technology might enhance the daily experience of keeping up with the news. I imagine that readers and journalists, too, would welcome such enhancements, not to mention media organizations that can’t afford to stand still in the face of declining revenues.
p.s. Full disclosure: I’ve been a subscriber to the print edition of the NY Times for many years. Far from being distracted, I’m an atypical reader who spends far in excess of the average 17 ½ hours per month reading news (even without Sudoku!). Call me instead one of the “attracted digerati,” who is interested in the evolution of news reporting and delivery.