Jeremy Wagstaff | Mon, 06/08/2009 11:10 AM | Sci-Tech
We're living in an age where change is happening so fast we're almost permanently dizzy.
Maybe previous generations felt like this too, but I suspect we're getting it worse. Particularly, for some reason, this year.
The big economic crisis is big. But what we're not noticing is how it's accelerating other kinds of changes.
If someone wanted to pinpoint the moment at which the West and the East started to shift in the way they looked at each other it would probably be sometime around . now.
I have no idea how all that kind of thing is going to pan out, but another huge change that we're not really ready for is the demise of newspapers.
We thought this would take another 10 years. Enough time for those of us employed in the profession to write a few obituaries, sigh a lot, appear on TV and nod sadly in the direction of the younger generation.
Not so. It's all happening now, and by the time you've finished reading this another bunch of newspapers will have closed their doors.
(Not, for now, in Asia, where some of the biggest newspaper audiences remain. But that doesn't mean it's not going to happen.)
A lot of things trouble me about this.
Why, for example, did we not see this coming? It drove me nuts how the smartest minds in journalism were so disdainful of the Internet and blogging and RSS and Twitter and all these bits and pieces that were gathering over the past decade on the crest of the hall, ready to overrun our ivory towers in one majestic charge.
Now those towers are overrun and the same crotchety old editors are trying to figure how to create a Twitter account and asking their niece to show them how to use an iPhone.
But all this just shows how little we understand our industry.
We think we're in the news industry. We're not. We're in the information industry.
We journalists are tied to our old habits, whether they are a "lede" (what you and I would call the point of the story), or the idea that we can't write anything until we know something.
We're stuck in a world of old ways of doing things that has outlasted its usefulness.
But it's not news that has died, it's our understanding of it. Call it a triumvirate of format, substance and medium.
We still think news is a headline, read out by a newscaster, or plastered in 60-point bold across three columns.
We still think of a "lede" as a certain number of characters, an active sentence, with the source at the end.
But these are all formats. They're not substance.
We all still want news. In fact we spend most of our day absorbing or distributing news.
It's just that we don't do it via a newspaper, a radio or a news website.
Those media are dead to us. We've moved on.
We do it via SMS, via blogs, via Facebook, via Twitter, via Skype, via Yahoo! Messenger.
These new ways of getting news - these new media - don't succumb easily to the old formats.
We are constantly exchanging pieces of information - intelligence - that we may picked up from someone, somewhere, credible or thoroughly discredited.
We sift through this stuff, verify it, pass it on, spike it.
Some of them read like headlines of old, but this is a mirage: Most of the stuff being exchanged is as close a relative to old-style news as washerwoman gossip is to the New Testament.
But still old-style media think that if they adopt the new mediums they can deliver the old format.
It's kind of sad to see news organizations trying to wake up to this. Now every news website has an RSS feed. It has a stable of bloggers - some news sites even hire bloggers from outside, others dress their older hands in cool new clothes and get them to blog.
Sometimes they trip up on this illusion that the medium and format are the same.
Take for example, one UK newspaper, which recently tried to be hip by setting up a Twitter feed - a cascade of short messages, falling down the newspaper's webpage.
Included in the automated feed was every Twitter message that mentioned the recent UK budget.
Users of course quickly figured out that any message, however insulting, would appear on the newspaper's home page if it contained the words "budget" and "UK". After dozens of messages containing swear words and epithets about the paper, usually in the same tweet, it eventually cottoned on and dropped the idea.
Newspaper error: A Twitter feed is not the same as a news feed.
So what are they doing wrong: Well, they are messing with the medium when they should be messing with the format.
They think that if somehow they can dabble with these new ways of delivering news they can win readers back. But the truth is that they need to not only tweak the medium but also tweak the format.
Take for example the Amazon Kindle. You've probably heard of it. It's an ebook reader, basically - a fancy display that renders digital text as close to the printed word as we've gotten it (for this kind of price, anyway).
A larger version was recently launched, and now newspapers hope it's going to save their hide. No more print editions, but a nice device that people can still read the news on.
In other words, a new medium.
Well, for those still reading, yes, maybe.
For the others, no device that mimics a newspaper is going to work. Those people who have given up on newspapers - or who never had much use for them - aren't going to suddenly embrace the Kindle.
They'll stick with their iPhone, Twitter application, or SMS, or smoke-signal, or however else they get their news.
What needs to happen is something much more radical. Traditional news people need to go back and figure out what "news" is in this day and age, and what part of that new landscape they could profitably occupy.
I don't think it involves "ledes", headlines and traditional ideas of news writing.
I don't think it's old fogeys trying to be hip by blogging and Twittering.
I don't think it's coming up with a device that looks enough like a newspaper for old newspaper folk to mop their brow with relief and think they've still got a chance.
I do think it's got a lot to do with finding new ways to capture information and display it, convey it and, hopefully, monetize it.
But I'm optimistic, because I believe the substance - information - hasn't changed. We still need good information, more than ever before.
The irony is a simple one: The more information becomes free, the more of it there is.
Which means that in an age of information we have too much of it, meaning that "good information" is a rarity - and therefore something we should, eventually, be willing to pay for.
Not to be reproduced without written permission from the author. Jeremy Wagstaff is a commentator on technology. He can be found online at jeremywagstaff.com or via email at jeremy@loose-wire.com.
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