Last week Jeff Jarvis must’ve said it a
half-dozen times: News is a conversation. The past couple days I’ve been wondering
what that means.
As I noted
yesterday, news has been one-way from the get-go: we report, you consume.
The Internet creates the possibility of two-way news: we report, you report
back. And it creates another possibility: you report, we report back.
At first I wondered if volunteer bloggers could give us extraordinary reach
into suburban markets. You’d have to account for the fact that most bloggers
give up after a few months, and that your volunteers have no monetary incentive
to keep a fresh flow of news coming (you could fix this by getting local college
students who are graded on their work to do these blogs. The trick would be
finding any who have any reason to give a crap about the communities they’re
supposed to be covering; maybe getting high school journalists involved could
be the answer. Or finding retirees: they’re already huge consumers of news,
have deep links to their community and have a good idea of where all the bodies
are buried. Or maybe you do both: students as reporters, retirees as moderators.
The problem with the blogging model of news is that it’s still mostly one-way;
allowing visitor comments could make it about 1.3-way, but the dominant majority
of people who visit blogs never use the comment feature, just as the dominant
majority of online news consumers never use the interactive forums that some
news sites provide. So then the question becomes: Should we be investing all
this energy to enable a conversation most people don’t want to have? After all,
forums inevitably become the domain of a few hardcore users and a few more hardcore
lurkers. It’s tough to build a forum audience you can sell to advertisers.
So, forums and blogs have limits, but they also have lessons, among them that
interactivity is highly addictive: once you contribute, there’s a huge desire
to see how people respond. As I was mulling all this yesterday, I had a brainstorm:
What if we created a hybrid of blogs and forums: a “send us your news” feature
in which people who’ve witnessed news type in their zipcode and maybe a couple
keywords (crime, traffic, entertainment, etc.) and post it live; each post could
have a comments feature for updates. Users could type in their zipcodes, sort
on a few keywords and see all the news reported in their area.
We could still use our volunteer bloggers to post most of the news, because
they’d have the most incentive, but we’d open up the game so anybody with news
to contribute can join in.
While all this is happening, the reporters for the dead-tree edition have a
vast new source of news tips they can put in their stories. People can go online
for the live feed, and read the paper to find out “what it all means.” It’s
the same urge you get when you go to a ballgame: you know the final score but
you want to see validation of your experience in the paper the next day. It’s
the also why you read reviews for movies you’ve already seen. Context.
One thing that has to happen is the emergence of a feedback loop between our
online news and print products. One needs to be driving consumers to the the
other. The newspaper has to hawk the hell out of its online operations, and
online needs to make it incredibly easy to subscribe to the paper. There’s gonna
be a dead-tree edition as long as advertisers get an advantage from putting
their ads on paper. That advantage may never well go away, so we may as well
get over the notion that newspapers are toast. They just seem like toast because
they’re crispy and stale. That’s something we can fix.
And it’s something we have to fix because they only thing standing in the
way of truly interactive news is the commitment to make it happen. The technology
exists, and we don’t own it. Anybody with enough money, patience and imagination
can become the next emperor of online local news. The bus’s engine is running
and it’ll be leaving the station soon. It’s high time we start buying up some
tickets.
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