{"id":309,"date":"2003-11-16T08:27:11","date_gmt":"2003-11-16T08:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/?p=309"},"modified":"2003-11-16T08:27:11","modified_gmt":"2003-11-16T08:27:11","slug":"talking-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/2003\/11\/talking-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking news"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week Jeff Jarvis <\/a>must’ve said it a
\nhalf-dozen times: News is a conversation. The past couple days I’ve been wondering
\nwhat that means.<\/p>\n

As I noted
\nyesterday<\/a>, news has been one-way from the get-go: we report, you consume.
\nThe Internet creates the possibility of two-way news: we report, you report
\nback. And it creates another possibility: you report, we report back.<\/p>\n

At first I wondered if volunteer bloggers could give us extraordinary reach
\ninto suburban markets. You’d have to account for the fact that most bloggers
\ngive up after a few months, and that your volunteers have no monetary incentive
\nto keep a fresh flow of news coming (you could fix this by getting local college
\nstudents who are graded on their work to do these blogs. The trick would be
\nfinding any who have any reason to give a crap about the communities they’re
\nsupposed to be covering; maybe getting high school journalists involved could
\nbe the answer. Or finding retirees: they’re already huge consumers of news,
\nhave deep links to their community and have a good idea of where all the bodies
\nare buried. Or maybe you do both: students as reporters, retirees as moderators.<\/p>\n

The problem with the blogging model of news is that it’s still mostly one-way;
\nallowing visitor comments could make it about 1.3-way, but the dominant majority
\nof people who visit blogs never use the comment feature, just as the dominant
\nmajority of online news consumers never use the interactive forums that some
\nnews sites provide. So then the question becomes: Should we be investing all
\nthis energy to enable a conversation most people don’t want to have? After all,
\nforums inevitably become the domain of a few hardcore users and a few more hardcore
\nlurkers. It’s tough to build a forum audience you can sell to advertisers.<\/p>\n

So, forums and blogs have limits, but they also have lessons, among them that
\ninteractivity is highly addictive: once you contribute, there’s a huge desire
\nto see how people respond. As I was mulling all this yesterday, I had a brainstorm:
\nWhat if we created a hybrid of blogs and forums: a “send us your news” feature
\nin which people who’ve witnessed news type in their zipcode and maybe a couple
\nkeywords (crime, traffic, entertainment, etc.) and post it live; each post could
\nhave a comments feature for updates. Users could type in their zipcodes, sort
\non a few keywords and see all the news reported in their area.<\/p>\n

We could still use our volunteer bloggers to post most of the news, because
\nthey’d have the most incentive, but we’d open up the game so anybody with news
\nto contribute can join in.<\/p>\n

While all this is happening, the reporters for the dead-tree edition have a
\nvast new source of news tips they can put in their stories. People can go online
\nfor the live feed, and read the paper to find out “what it all means.” It’s
\nthe same urge you get when you go to a ballgame: you know the final score but
\nyou want to see validation of your experience in the paper the next day. It’s
\nthe also why you read reviews for movies you’ve already seen. Context.<\/p>\n

One thing that has to happen is the emergence of a feedback loop between our
\nonline news and print products. One needs to be driving consumers to the the
\nother. The newspaper has to hawk the hell out of its online operations, and
\nonline needs to make it incredibly easy to subscribe to the paper. There’s gonna
\nbe a dead-tree edition as long as advertisers get an advantage from putting
\ntheir ads on paper. That advantage may never well go away, so we may as well
\nget over the notion that newspapers are toast. They just seem like toast because
\nthey’re crispy and stale. That’s something we can fix.<\/p>\n

And it’s something we have to fix because they only thing standing in the
\nway of truly interactive news is the commitment to make it happen. The technology
\nexists, and we don’t own it. Anybody with enough money, patience and imagination
\ncan become the next emperor of online local news. The bus’s engine is running
\nand it’ll be leaving the station soon. It’s high time we start buying up some
\ntickets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n

Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tommangan.net\/printsthechaff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}