Quality, bias, and the future of news

So, two really interesting things in the “Among the Audience” article: 1) that more than half of teens (56%) post content online (even assuming this includes social networking, it’s remarkable); 2) Barry Diller’s quote that “talent is the new limited resource.” Jerry Michalski has an interesting retort – “What an ignoramus!” But boring is boring and as Mark Tremayne found in his network analysis study, good, original journalism matters, to both quality and audience size. Michalski’s partly right – online is (can be?) just as good as print or TV, but not everybody is.

Oh My News (from the “Compose Yourself” article) is intriguing because it lives, like Wikipedia, on a “tip-jar” system of funding. This is a bit like a Nielsen rating or even the collection coming after the sermon Sunday morning – it’s a direct reflection of perceived value of the site, and presumably the content on the site. It’s exciting that OhMy has led to increased conversation online in traditional news outlets. I dare say the discourse is probably a lot more informed and polite in Seoul than it is here, but I don’t know. It’s extremely important that OhMy serves as a counter to the lopsided media bias. Talk radio and now partisan news, like MSNBC and Fox, play that role here. Ironically, their success is growing in today’s U.S. media environment while the traditional objective outlets are all losing audience. Hmm… so is ideology the future of profitable news? Or is it tip-jar non-profit journalism? Oh, and the beauty of the folks at Current TV receiving upwards of half their content is that they don’t have to pay for half their content.

Philip Rosedale kind of misses the point. The RIGHT way to think about Second Life, or any other vehicle, is “let’s build a really cool swing and see if we can get somebody to PAY to sit on it.” I there’s ego (Twitter), conceit (Facebook’s “what I’m doing now”) and full-on narcissism, which is embodied… well, I guess disembodied by Second Life. Really? People have time to swing, build houses and publish a couple of newspapers in a virtual world? I’m concerned about the lack of an informed citizenry in the real world.

The economics of choice

In the Economist article, "Among the Audience," the writer states: "What is new is that young people today, and most people in the future, will be happy to decide for themselves what is credible or worthwhile and what is not." The piece goes on to say that sometimes there will be help from human editors and new filtering and collaboration technologies. That seems to be where we're headed, especially with Twitter, etc., but the question still remains, to what end?

It seems that nearly every discussion of the future of media is packed with proclamations and predictions about what people will be doing in the future, but rarely do we hear in those discussions attempts at assessing why anyone will be doing new fad x, y or z.

Similarly, David Gauntlett, in his article, "Media Studies 2.0," states that the "emergent alternative" to the traditional approach will in part be characterized by the replacement of the "fetishised expert" with a "focus on everday meanings," or content produced by audience members interested in new qualitative research techniques.

There is an assumption here that the audience brings with it a sense of "everydayness" which is difficult to prove. The audience can bring with it many things—expertise, ignorance, varying degrees of truth—but just because they are not professional content producers does not imply that they are somehow more real than paid journalists. We need to ask ourselves why an audience wants to participate rather than adjust and encourage participation without understanding motives.