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.
As long as people use IE and browsers that don't natively support ad-blocking (or pop-up blocking, as is the case up to SP2), ads will still be the driving force behind Internet mainstream news. Once ad-blockers really catch on, registration will be required more for spam purposes, then after that, it'll require real registration and payment.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Who said it was a utopia? Most people getting their news from major news sites that are offshoots of the same media companies that run TV. The other news is made up of what people actively seek to find out about. So that means people going out and finding the stories that reinforce their existing opinions, further fragmenting society.
Utopia? Not as such.
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The future of Internet News
When I read news, I want 3 page articles about it. Most of these stories you read online or in a paper could be put into one sentence and it would have the same value.
The content control becomes oligarchical. At least, that's where it leads.
It happened 122 years ago. News at 11.
ergo, Darwin has nothing to say about this.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Well, you know in cyberpunk movies how the technology always seems old and cobbled-together? Well, thats what people will start doing when things are commodotized enough and when they lose all the freedom they used to have with the old stuff. The "new shiny internet" (tm) will be a DRM laden piece of crap, and anybody who is interested will just hop on a darknet.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
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.
Hmm, I personally get the majority of my news from the 'net - the New York Times is simply prohibitively expensive in real life up here in Canada, and Google News and CNET provide some info that I wouldn't otherwise find in the local papers - which are quite good.
That being said, I do read a real paper every morning with breakfast, and I don't see the current model of dual-distribution fading (that of the print edition + the internet edition. Some choice quotes from the post are simply not going to hold up:
With the uprise of ad blockers, are we going to be able to get our news for free?
I'd like to see some statistics, but I don't think that this is a widespread phenomenon. Indeed, I know a lot of tech savvy people and some don't use ad-blocker for philosophical reasons, and some are just too lazy (some do use it, and I think it's great). And the majority of people continue to use IE, and even smirk at the notion of switching browsers!
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?
Come now.. Utopia? Seems a little perjorative. Yes, there are advantages - but the good, fact-referenced (well, hopefully) stories are only there because of the ads and the print editions! The internet is in most cases a mere adjunct of the print edition. It does offer advantages.. but some disadvantages too. I love my computer, and I still prefer reading a print edition . . . can't even put a rational reason down. I spend most of my day looking at computers anyways.
Will the Internet become a place for the "selected few" with money to spend?
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.
So, for those reasons, I feel the future of internet news is bright and doesn't hold any of the radical changes forseen by 'Matthew'.
"There's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."
- Bob Dylan
Yes, what would Darwin say about television, radio and newspapers? Let's see... Darwin was a biologist, and none of these are biological. They don't reproduce, so they're not susceptible to natural selection, and they don't need to mate, so sexual selection is also irrelevant. I guess evolution happens through other means in the media business.
How does the "uprise [sic] of ad blockers" change anything? We've been flipping past newspaper ads, going to the bathroom during TV commercials and changing the channel during radio ad spots for quite a while, and the free market hasn't collapsed -- how is the Internet any different?
Slashdot::NYTimes as Dung Beetle::Elephant
Albeit, I first found out about the Columbine shooting and the Columbia explosion the day both of those happened while checking slashdot.
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.
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 Internet is the penultimate example of a "free market" information system. Literally anyone who has access to a computer (and this can be just about anyone who has the necessary basic skills, thanks to public access from libraries and such) can have their say in a public forum, and have others see what they've said and sometimes respond with their own opinions.
The obvious advantage of this is that there will always be multiple perspectives on any given subject, from the mainstream to the personal to the radical or absurd. Ideally, this would mean that each person who reads the news online has the ability to weigh various viewpoints, and formulate their own opinion based on these. This can also lead to situations like bloggers bringing down Dan Rather for reports on documents that were falsified. So, in an ideal world, all perspectives would be considered and eventually, the truth would emerge.
However, the problem arises when all these sources are based on something that is supposedly "common knowledge" but is in fact not true. The best example I can think of offhand is the infamous "I invented the Internet" quote from Al Gore. Even though the transcript of what he actually said is readily available, and those who had a clue figured out what it was that was actually said, the general public accepted that Al Gore said, "I invented the Internet." Even today, most people would agree that Al Gore said that. His opponents and even his supporters said it bolstered his arrogant image, and in an election that was decided by less than a thousand votes, one could argue that it cost him the election. So, even though the truth was accessible, it did not match with what is still today commonly accepted.
So, the fact is that one can find any perspective on anything through the Internet. The problem is: What happens when all those perspectives are based on some unifying falsehood?
Love the Third Amendment?
All I block is popups.
I love the principle of advertising covering website costs. Why? Because I don't feel like giving out cash to read the news.
If ads, don't cover enough of the bill, were going to end up with micropayments. Using something like Amazon.com as an intermediary... and you pay perhaps $0.25-0.50 to read an article. IMHO I'd rather not get to that point.
I don't think banners are such a big deal. I prefer the subtle google ones.
IMHO the best model uses the following:
- Banner Ads
- Subscription service for no ads
- Micropayments
Just the other day I started resurrecting MacVillage.net. I did that as well. There banner adsads (I'm considering a subscription service if people want it). And there's the ability to give a micropayment ($1).
On the bottom of the page is a simple request. If you can spare a dollar, and want to keep the minimalist ad appearance, consider giving a dollar.
In the past life of the website, it prevented popup ads and such. Hopefully this time it will as well.
Here's an example
The ads IMHO aren't obtrusive or in the way. There will be one Google text ad in the content area (I'm experimenting with that). But intentionally text so it doesn't stick out to much.
I like having very few ads. And hopefully enough people like it too... and will help keep it that way.
I think everyone benefits.
The future of news and the future of computing will be tied up in the idea of Trust. Information will become more valuable the more it is trusted. The question that needs to be asked is how do I trust you and how do you trust me online.
Which leads to the next question, who do you trust with vouching for yourself online. And realize the answer to the question will be the person who will know you, and not some false or pseudonym. Who do you trust saying you are you, and that you do indeed know what you are talking about regarding the subject you are speaking of.
I personally don't want any of the following as vouching for me exclusively: The Government, My Bank (or anyone I pay money to to vouch for me). Now do I trust my friends, do I trust my church to vouch for me, and which of those do you trust? Also, what happens when I go from being a citizen of one state to another? Or from one country to another? What happens when I'm trusted by a known non-trusted/enemy organization?
Granted there are a ton of solutions out there, but nothing which is accepted yet. And each of these solutions have problems.
Fantasy remains a human right; we make in our measure and in our derivative mode... -- JRR Tolkien
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.
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.
Hello webmasters,
I block your ads when they get in my way.
Remember the [blink] tag? Why would a flashing graphic be any less annoying?
If your ads flash, blink, move around, make noise, or freeze my browser for 3 minutes while it loads an in-banner video I do not want to see, I will block your ads.
Do not bitch, moan, or say "but it's the advertisers that want to annoy you so". Just don't have ads that attempt to FORCE me to watch them. I will go to your site, I will block the ads, I will not feel bad about it. I used to block them my putting hand over the screen, now I have a ready-made plug-in that lets me rest my arm. The more intolerable your ads become, the more drastic our countermeasures become. This didn't have to be an arms race, but since you forced our hand, now we have adblock.
Sincerly,
Someone fed up.
You can't take the sky from me...
"Why read day-old news when you can get up to the minute headlines via http and RSS?"
Because most newspapers come with editorials, opinion pieces and investigative journalism that is not found online (and is more likely to be real)...
Plus you get a good source of paper to put on the floor or wrap things in.
Brilliant!
Thanks for that informative link to Slashdot on the Slashdot home page. Now I know how to get to Slashdot to read the news.
Yahoo news crawls some 7000+ news sites, Google News crawls 4500+ English news sites, and Topix.net crawls 10,000+ news sites. Once you add in the thousands of local blogs, you will need a system like Topix.net to filter the relentless stream of news articles and posts that are generated every day. You will need something that can sort through the news, determine the trends, and ignore the old repeated stories for you and present them to you in RSS for consumption with your favorite RSS news reader.
-AS
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.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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.
What happens when the advertisers figure out what's going on with adblock and they start hosting ads that looks like:
http://cnn.com/saibjkb26234/istc6d23.gif
If the name of the ad is randomly generated, you would have a hard time blocking just the adds without also resorting to blocking all images at this website. It would be almost impossible to block text based ads.
Why is this so bad? Even if people get their news from 1 or 2 sources that are heavily biased, the opposing viewpoints are a click away. Often, they provide links and connect to each other, despite being mortal enemies with irreconcilable differences. (I never heard of Daily Kos until I started reading LGF regularly, for instance.)
Users get to determine what they read and in what format they read it in. They can even determine how much of which slant they want on the story.
Without the internet, you would have to search long and far to find opposing viewpoints. You'd have to take what you read at face value or go pay a visit to the library and hope they have recent, relevant material. Either that, or you'd have to subscribe to every magazine and newspaper on earth.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Although I get a lot of news through the 'net (both local and from my home country) I also get a real newspaper every day. For me personally, a real paper has long in-depth articles, or even just fuller versions of the same stories.
The other problem with Internet news - it may just be a problem with people in general, but exacerbated by the 'net - is that it creates tunnel vision, only tuning into the news you want to hear, that backs up your own prejudices. I cringe whenever I see people posting links from places like World Net Daily or Indy Media as if the content within is gospel truth, not heavily spun to the left or right semi-fiction.
I know of course that traditional print media also has political bias, but the spin is usually appended onto the pure reportage so both can be separated.
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)
Good for you.
However, I don't have a blackberry (whatever that is), and my cell phone is designed for, er, making phone calls. It doesnt do the internet, and if it did I wouldnt much want to read it on a 5*20 character display, or whatever it is.
Bearing in mind I'm a young, single male, in a first world nation (UK) with all the tech available if I want it, with a fairly well-paid job, and a long-standing penchant for geek toys and techy things.... in terms of the world at large, I think I am in the top 0.1% of the population who is likely to have such tech.
But I still don't have these things.
So, um, don't count on paper vanishing instantly. Try to remember - you are not a representative sample of the entire world.
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
Thanks to the beeb, I will get free news.
I'm casting no asparagus here, but when the original source is gone and there is no "library" of archived material you can check against, how can anyone be sure that a newsitem on a geocities account is complete and faithful to the original?
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
There is no such thing as "public record" on the internet. :(
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
Unless you buy an online subscription, the news on the web is just headlines with little in depth material.
Yeah, so buy a subscription! People do need to realize that it does cost money to report news. From paying the reporter to outfitting them with camera equipment etc..., to paying news distribution costs (even Internet distribution has significant costs), it all is not free and if you find a news source that provides you with information you value, support them. Thus my admonition to support NPR. I send money to NPR, the WSJ and the NYTimes and Slashdot because I value their information. As to the others, their models make one view advertisements to pay for the delivery costs, and that is OK by me as long as they are not overly obtrusive and block the actual news.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I'm talking about archives, which can help establish truth. If you cannot establish beyond a doubt that the "archived" version of a page is what was actually published X years ago, you can't prove anything, whether you are Joe Blogger or the Vatican.
Sometimes seventeen/Syllables aren't enough to/Express a complete
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
I apply the same approach to television news. Where I am, we get one channel broadcasting news at 5pm, another two at 6pm, and a fourth at 7pm. That means that (if you can stand listening to that much crap for that long) you can get at least three different versions of events from TV alone every day.
At first I found it interesting that each providor put such a totally different spin on the 'facts', then it amused me - don't these people realise that people can watch other versions of events, and see right through their sensationalist crap?
Now it just sickens me. It sickens me that they have zero conscience and zero integrity, and zero interest in reporting what actually happened and that they spin such totally misrepresented crap knowing full well that plenty of people don't know any better than to just swallow their stories hook, line and sinker.
Journalistic integrity is a long-dead myth. Those bastards don't care about reporting facts, they care about finding ways to feed advertising to people, and if they have to sensationalise a story to the point of outright lying to get people to listen/read/watch their advertising, then they won't hesitate for a second to do it.
It's not about the news anymore folks, it's about the advertising.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Thanks for the hyperlink to Slashdot Cliff. It's funny that I've never come across this site.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
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.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
I am really waiting for a proxy kind on neural net bayesian filter thingie that filters the news for me.
Maybe an rss reader which recognizes the headlines I click on or offers radio buttons for rating: (*) interresting ( ) neutral ( ) not interresting.
It could then drop headlines I am certainly not interrested in or present the good ones more prominent.
I'd also like this agent to index all the web pages I surf and give me a search interface for my browsing history. How often did you find something interresting you forgot to bookmark and you cant remember on which browsers history (home, laptop, work, girlfriends computer) you should search?
It could try to cluster my interrests and skim some selected news sites. If an article fits into the stuff I like it could be presented like: You might want to read this...
And this same agent could periodically check selected web pages for changes and for example check for showing up or vanishing terms or phrases. Example: "Alert me when term 'version 3.4 beta' is not on the page any more OR when term '3.5' shows up on the page."
You ask why I am not programming such a buddy. Because I suck.
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!