Oh lordy, I hope John Byrne, BusinessWeek executive editor, is wrong in his “The changing truths of journalism.” Citing a Bivings Group study, Byrne reports that magazines are even further behind the Web curve than newspapers.
Byrne appears to break the future of magazines into five possible scenarios, each bleaker than the last:
- Aggregation (what, drive eyeballs away? No way)
- Curation (there’s no curation; report, file, and move on)
- Verticals (massive traffic is the goal, remember?)
- User-generated content (eww, just eww)
- Automated story placement (robots are the future)
Context is now as important as content, according to Byrne. And the mediasphere has been exploded into pieces of niches, “organized around individual interests and passions.”
Let’s parse this. First of all, context has always been as important as content. Information without context is worse than useless: it can be dangerous. Glad to hear the corporate types are finally starting to figure this out.
Next, I suspect niches are wearing thin and that we as a population don’t crave more specialization at all. I know I’m spending more and more of my media diet foraging for information in which I didn’t know I was interested. I love accidentally stumbling upon an interesting story—in a field in which I have no abiding interest—serendipitously. Like this one in the New York Times by Michael Kimmelman on how Italy is considering consolidating management of the country’s museums with the guy who ran McDonald’s in Italy.
I don’t want more specificity (at least not all the time), I want more generality: less trees, more forest. Are we really headed for a 1:1 ratio of writers to readers? Please, no. I need specific information in my areas of specialty, but I’m just as interested—sometimes much more so—in things I didn’t know I was interested in.
Byrne goes on to write, “what readers need in this environment is often help in organizing, sorting, and sifting through all the articles.” Byrne clearly gets this, but his point is almost certainly going to be mistaken by his corporate media brethren. We don’t want your biased and heavy-handed filters, thanks anyway. We’ve had enough of that. What we want are the do-it-yourself tools to enable us to, well, do it ourselves.
We used to do this for our friends. We’d send clippings, pictures, books, and other artifacts to our friends and colleagues. Then came email and we evolved this practice into small, intimate groups that could be managed with a simple distribution list. Then came the web and we began publishing and linking publicly, and the personal was lost. Then came social media in an attempt to regain the personal but it’s not working. I’ve come, grudgingly, to recognize Twitter and LinkedIn as wonderful and powerful tools, but they can’t replace the personal recommendation.
BusinessWeek‘s Business Exchange is an attempt to get the specificity bit at least partially right, but at the expense of the general. A user creates a topic which pulls related links from all over the Web. A sort of topic-specific search engine. The landing page of each topic is populated not by an editor but algorithmically (robots!), by the “most active or useful” stories. Instead of writing and editing, writers and editors curate: “Our reporters and editors do not report, write and edit for the Exchange. But they do help to curate the content, adding relevant stories, blog posts, white papers, academic reports, and other reference materials to each topic.”
Business Exchange is somewhat useful so long as you know what you’re looking for, and Byrne’s idea of polling the community to inform the publication of the topics they want covered, using them as secondary sources, and engaging them in conversation are stellar ideas. Byrne calls Business Exchange “a revolutionary departure.” I’m not sure about that—the business model seems to be to sell advertising around aggregated third-party content.
Byrne writes that through venues like Business Exchange, journalism becomes a process instead of a product. I’d argue that journalism has always been a process and that Byrne is merely attempting to outsource it. What happens when no one is writing and editing and everyone is curating and collecting?
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