As a Generation X’er, I am one of the rare individuals (besides faculty and mid-careers) at MIT and Harvard who happen to remember the time before the commercial internet. This was a time where the majority still subscribed to the daily print newspaper. I clearly remember how i eagerly looked for the next issue of Young World weekly magazine published by Dawn Newspaper (now online at dawn.com). There was no way for me to get the latest articles or stories unless they were published. This ecosystem of news media followed a linear pattern, from journalists reporting the news, news institutions publishing them, and consumers like us consuming them. The pre-internet age certainly feels like the prehistoric age when; internet has changed the way we create, consume, and share this information. News and print media organizations are still operating as the pre-internet age dinosaurs. Unless they adapt to this tectonic shift, they risk getting extinct much like our predecessors on this planet.
Print-media or Dinosaurs?
In their seminal piece “Post-Industrial Journalism”, Shirky, Anderson, and Bell highlight the changing landscape of the news industry brought about by the internet and communication technologies. The simplest of smartphones in the market now comes equipped with a voice & video recorder, camera, and powered by internet. These digital probes supported by web 2.0 software provide the digital horsepower that was once the purview of news and media professionals in the pre-internet age (or dinosaur era, you pick). The traditional linear ecosystem of news has been redefined. Using these tools anyone, anyplace, and anytime can tweet, share, and report an incident in their surrounding as witnessed by the live-tweeting of Sohaib Athar of the most secretive of military strikes in recent memory. In the current ecosystem, no longer do we have to wait for the news to be delivered to us, instead we are actively seeking it, and sharing it on social media. This paradigm shift has changed the way Journalists, News-Media, and Authorities operate. The traditional business models that drove the growth of print media are obsolete.
Traditionally, print papers and news-media served as the primary source for the news . This opened the possibilities of advertising based business model for news organizations. Classified, pages on news-papers were sold as prime property. This roughly translated to the web in the form of CPM structure based on views or clicks per 1000 views. But in the new model no longer are people bound to the news organizations for news. The traditional click and view based advertising schemes do not work. Shrky, Anderson, and Bell offer suggestions for Journalists, News-Media, and Authorities to embrace the new technologies, make collaboration key to their reporting, and build an ecosystem that takes advantage of the internet rather than shuns it.
Journalists and reporters must embrace new technologies, be tech savvy, understand the tools that take advantage of the internet and foremost learn to collaborate. A nytimes reporter could have collaborated with Sohaib Athar and published the ‘exclusive’ news of the Osama Bin Laden raid in Abbottabad. In the current model, anyone can be a source of news, journalists must learn to take advantage and collaborate. Newsmedia and Institutions must serve as the enablers in their transformation as a modern news agency. They must provide the framework or the content management system (CMS) through which reports, news, and statistics can be reported quickly and shared on social networks. Like journalists, they must embrace the new technologies and use them for their advantage.
News-Media: must combine new with the old!
Startups and organizations such as VOX and Quartz are couple of examples of media organizations that are attempting to use technology and the new paradigm for their advantage. They are not available in print, embrace social, embrace the mobile-phone culture, encourage collaboration and sharing of their news, and take advantage of the business models afforded to them. Using online advertising, paywalls, and the long-tail, VOX and Quartz are the few news-media organizations that report news, garner web-traffic, and stay profitable. In many ways they embody the modern day news-media organizations that are rebellious enough to embrace new technologies and paradigms necessary to survive and traditional enough to carry forward the news-media industry.
Ali S. Kamil 