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?"

Comments

Bloggers

[BWJones]

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.

Limited Spectrum

[vondo]

My worry is that as people get more and more news via the Internet, they will self-limit the spectrum of the news they get. News on the Internet will come from an increasingly large number of sources with narrower and narrower viewpoints, and people will pick the viewpoint that matches their own most closely, thereby closing their minds to other viewpoints. In other words, amplify what Fox News has done many times over.

I don't claim to be immune to this, the only on-line site I where I typically read in-depth articles is Salon.

depends....

[Lxy]

For daily news, the internet works well. Check the headlines, check sports scores, movie times, events, etc.

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. /. 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.

Blogs

[FiReaNGeL]

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.

Advantage of Internet News

[reporter]

When we talk about Internet news, we must talk about it in conjunction with search engines like Yahoo! Search. In that context, the Internet has 2 advantages over the old style of retrieving news. First, Internet news means instant access to the latest and most in-depth information. In the old days, the quickest access was television (e.g. CNN), but it was not the most in-depth. (How much depth can you get by 2 minutes of coverage on the nightly news?) Now, you can access instantaneous analyses written by the "Washington Post" and the "Wall Street Journal" for example. Further, web sites at CNN and Fox News also provide in-depth instantaneous news.

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.

The usual diversity

[G4from128k]

Why does everyone always think that things must converge to some single future state? Regarding ad-blockers, I see three responses.

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., /.), and small, free personal news sites (blogs).

My masters thesis

[jd]

...was on producing a viable Internet-based news service. I started from the premise that different people read the same news for different reasons, and that some form of customization was therefore going to be important.

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.