Slashdot Mirror
Future of Internet News?
Matthew asks: "Now that the Internet has become an integral part of many people's lives, it has also become the place where many of us get our daily news reports (think Slashdot, New York Times, etc). The decentralization of the Internet offers many advantages over traditional media such as newspapers and television, as the user has more control over what to view and when to view it. But how does the future of this utopia look? With the uprise of ad blockers, are we going to be able to get our news for free? Will the Internet become a place for the "selected few" with money to spend? How do DRM and Trusted Computing play into the role? What does Darwin say will happen to newspapers, radio, television?"
Well, I have made the transition to obtaining almost all of my news via the Internet. It started back with the first news item I saw first on the Internet, the Oklahoma City Federal building bombing and has accelerated ever since. Certainly the future of news gathering will be via dissemination on the Internet whether that news is contained in Internet feeds of video from traditional news sources like CNN, CBS, ABC, etc.... but the growing numbers of blog reporting sites will become an even greater force in refining information delivered via traditional outlets and through the creation and reporting of novel news items. Of course 99% of bloggers do not have the resources individually that major news organizations have, but this is changing with group blogs and communities of bloggers.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I think Newsmap, a quasi-graphical google-news site, will be a model for how news is "viewed" in the future. check it out here. It's quite easy to use.
I don't claim to be immune to this, the only on-line site I where I typically read in-depth articles is Salon.
For daily news, the internet works well. Check the headlines, check sports scores, movie times, events, etc.
/. deals with that kind of traffic every day. Maybe the brains at /. that keep the site running under constant load could help these sites out. Just a thought.
Where big news breaks, so does the internet. Take a look at the Sept 11 attacks. ALL major news outlets were down. Slashdot stayed up*, but offered limited info. When it came down to it, radio and TV were the only reliable sources. The internet just can't handle demand for broadcast content. Even newspapers were able to get info printed before the internet outlets began to respond again.
The internet can be used as a news medium, but only when traffic permits.
* Have you guys ever thought of starting a news consulting service? CNN, Nytimes, USAToday, and most other new outlets can't handle the load.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I think one of the 'problems' of reading online news sources, are that you seek out news that confirms your world view. You also tend out to seek out news that you think might be interesting to you, and missing on a whole lot of other news.
Take the tsunami for instance. I wasn't watching the news or reading the papers around the time (hadn't started up my newspaper subscription yet). I did seek out the usual online sources, clicking only the links that I thought would be interesting to me. I didn't actually find out about the extent of the tsunami until Wednesday, and that's only because I saw it on CNN (tv not website).
Reading newspapers, I tend to read for start to finish, picking up interesting book reviews or local events I wouldn't have read about otherwise.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Also, since News services, as far as we know, isn't DNA based, doesn't use inheritance and wasn't bred using natural selection- I don't really think that Darwin would exactly be an authority you would want to ask even if he was extremely young for his age.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"While blogging, I discovered something.
My blog is about biology and bioinformatics news. I had the habit of visiting some science news sites... recently, I found the RSS feeds of many press release services. News flash : most "science news" sites just copy/paste press releases. I do the same 50% of the time too, because it gets the point across when the PR is well written. But I do add my opinion / grain of salt when I can, which most science news site don't take the time to do / don't have the expertise necessary to understand. Being a PhD in bioinformatics with a strong biology background sure helps for that; and to filter unrelevant junk science news (there's lots of that, trust me).
Future of news? If its that easy to get on-par (content-wise) with most of the old-fashioned news source, independant sites like mine, run by expert on a niche topic, might be the future. Blogs are just another medium; it helps publishing fast and easy.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
The second advantage is the real reason for the success of news on the Internet. The Internet serves as a huge database of old stories, facts, and analyses. In the old days, 2 years after you read a story in the "Washington Post", you may forget the exact details. Retrieving the original story requires a trip to the library and manually scanning through hundreds of reels of microfiche. In short, accessing the old story was prohibitively expensive, but that old story may contain critical information for assessing government policy towards, say, Taiwan.
Now, you can use Yahoo! Search to simply find the old story and access it within 15 seconds. You can quickly determine whether our government policy towards, say, Taiwan is correct. No longer can charlatans and quacks fool or manipulate you as easily.
In fact, I myself have used the power of the Internet to find the latest news about Taiwan and have summarized what I found. The reality of Taiwan is quite damning of current American policy.
Blogs and Podcasting will be the news media of the future. There will be many people who will take up new roles as honest and active reporters.
Why does everyone always think that things must converge to some single future state? Regarding ad-blockers, I see three responses.
/.), and small, free personal news sites (blogs).
First, I'd wager that some sites will rearrange their content to be less pleasant to read with ad-blocking enabled or will create in-line text ads that are much harder to filter. Ad-hating people will stop visiting those sites, but the sites will still attract enough audience to survive. The number of free, ad-supported sites might decline, but will never go to zero.
Second, if anything, ad-blocking will further entrench the corporate subscription-only sites because it kills the natural migration path for small personal sites. Currently, a growing small site can recoup its bandwidth costs with ads. If that avenue is not open, then small sites must either sell-out to a big corporation or close up shop when the traffic gets too high.
Third, perhaps one solution is a bittorrent-like version of the WWW for small popular sites. Small sites that cannot afford to have a million or even a thousand daily viewers will submit their content to a bittorrent-like entity.
In short, technology and trends will mean that there will always be some number of big for-pay news sites (e.g., WSJ); medium-sized ad-supported sites (e.g.,
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'd also consider 3rd party micro-payment collectors, or perhaps gov. approved companies to collect and regulate micro-payment for internet use. I would mind paying 1/3 cent to view my favorite website without ads. Would you?
Advertisers will realise that pop-ups suck and everyone hates them, where as old fashioned banner ads are perfectly fine and few people block them. Systems like salon are also ok if a bit annoying. The general rule is if its too annoying then people will find a way around it or just go somewhere else. Every format has its own optimum advertising style - TV for example is suited to having reasonably spaced breaks - eg 15-30 minutes apart that have mostly interesting adverts that people want to watch. If you fuck with that or start putting banner ads in TV programs then people get pissed off and skip them like in the US.
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It is inevitable that newpapers will move to a subscription model. Online ad revenue is low and there is just too much money involved, and the sources of the information are in the hands of a few news organisations.
:)
Just like iTunes changed music, one day (quite soon, and just as suddenly) we will see an iNews equivalent giving paid access to multiple news sources. On the other side legal enforcement of their IP by news agencies will be stepped up (just like RIAA). Most newsgathering is in the hands of a few companies (Reuters, AP etc), when they say "no more free sites," it's over.
There will be lots of complaints form the "information wants to be free" crowd, but they will end up paying anyway.
To maintain their sites, Bloggers will actually be amongst the first to sign-up to such a model. Especially when they realise they can receive substantial affilliate money for sign-ups
Newsblogs are good for fact-checking and opinion. The hard bit, the newsgathering and primary reporting is what people have to pay for (because there can be no opinion pieces without it).
Blogs will always be hampered by this lack of ability to actually gather news. As mainstream media realises that blog-like opinion is easy to add to their sites, there will be further integration of user opinion and blog-like features into their sites.
We're already seeing this trend with the increase in the number of available broadcast, satellite and cable channels. There are countless news shows, and each one can target a niche market. Few have incentive to even try to remove the appearance of bias; in fact, they increase the bias to help define their niche more clearly.
With the unlimited number of sources on the Internet, I believe that the trend will simply accelerate.
Not to mention if the inet news is even trustworthy. Usually all (or most) news in newspapers (especially such high ranked as NY Post, Washington Post,...) the info is atleast checked for authority before publishing. inet news is usually (especially true for slashdot lately it seems) news is just covered up in some fancy writing and put on the front page with possiblly some annoying tittle as 'The death of Microsoft' just to find out when you read the article that some 16 year old blogger thought it would be cool to write an article about some stupid stuff he doesn't even remotely know about just to make some publicity (btw Slashdot comes very near the top here). Most people only read the tittle, fewer read the snippet, even fewer read the fucking article.
Well, it makes perfect sense - make a story people will argue about and you will have more and more users - trolls just can't resist fighting back.
From top of my head news.com.com seems like a good news site which can be compared to other famous newspapers.
This was generally backed by the statistics from the server and the results from the questionaire. The ability to cross-reference and thread stories was also useful, but only to those who had become "involved" in a story in progress.
Based on this work, I'm going to say pretty much what I said when I was doing this work - news carriers will become information repositories. How the user chooses to access that information will become increasingly personal. The ability to cross-reference stories from multiple sources will become increasingly important, as news vendors discover that you don't need both journalists AND editors.
In consequence, I expect the news system to split into various tiers. First-tier news vendors will have journalists in the field actually gathering news. To some extent, this already happens, but it is likely to become much more severe. Second-tier news vendors will have editors but no journalists. They'll compile news, but not generate any. Again, a lot of vendors already do this (see how many quote AP, Reuters, etc) but they usually still have some news-gathering staff. Third-tier news vendors will have far more commentary than actual hard news.
It makes no sense, economically, to have multiple companies do essentially identical work on all tiers. Outsourcing is cheap and allows for specialization. Specialization, in turn, can mean fewer competitors in that field, which means the potential for greater profits.
If my prediction is correct, then I expect different tiers to charge in different ways. The primary news sources would likely charge a small amount (to maximise the customer base) and on a per story fragment basis. The second tier will likely charge a subscription, where the price depends on what features you want. Third-tier commentary sites will likely be free, and will probably be increasingly sponsored by the other news groups.
Advertising on the Internet is likely to die a death, as more sophisticated blocking techniques are developed, and as distrust over potential spyware scams increases. In consequence, sponsorship in return for increased references is likely to be the preferred model in the future. Doubly so, as search engines adopt the Google method of using references to place sites.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
On the internet, there is no such thing as "public record". It is near-impossible to establish who said what in the past, even large, venerable institutions such as the NYT, which used to call itself "The Paper Of Record".
I don't know about you, but to me it's a pretty bad situation.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
No. I don't think so. The current distrbution model is working just fine. Ad-revenues are good, and there are simply so many online sources of news (NYT, CBC, BBC, Washington Post, etc. etc.) that if one paper goes to a pay model, then boom - they just loose their market share. They could all get together, but that would be monopoly and illegal.
That hasn't stopped monopolies from forming. My understanding, is that they see the government fines as a cost of doing business.
It's a good shot and a noble project, but would you want to have only one library, with limited funding and space, for the entire world?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Free news on the Internet would be like Free journalism. People will be able to post news and well as read others. But on the other hand, the news would not be moderated, hence it may lead to fraudelent news or yellow journalism. So, though we can take sites like NYTimes, /. or Hindustan Times as bench mark sites for news, personal blogs might not be that reliable as a source for news in the near future.
With the rise of blogs, rss and the like, it will be easy to spread false news as it is to publish accurate ones.
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