January 02, 2011 08:57 PM UTC

The News Will Find Me

•  
• by: DavidThi808

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

One of the best comments I have heard about the future of news is a teenager when asked how he reads the news said “that news I need to know will find me.” In other words, he does not go to any news website, nor even a news aggregator. But through his social media from Facebook friends, tweets he follows, etc., he will get any news that is relevant to him.

This is not just the future of how news will be delivered, it’s the present. Demographics trumps all and everyday people who actually pull news from a news source die of old age while people who won’t are born. Going by memory I think it’s now age 35 where no one younger reads a newspaper or hits a news website regularly. This is a significant chunk of the population and over the next couple of decades will approach 100%.

So what does this mean? Well here’s a couple of gigantic things:

1. The mainstream media is trying to present their content on their websites in a way to move people from their newspapers/magazines/TV to their websites. This will fail. Younger people have no interest in a destination news site. None. They are interested in specific content produced on that site important enough that it finds them. So the problem just got a lot harder – it’s not how do you monetize your news website, it’s how do you monetize individual stories.
2. How do political campaigns get their message out? Most people will not find the messaging from a campaign “news I need to know.” A large and growing chunk of the populace does not see TV commercials between TIVO, Hulu, and bittorrent. Campaigns are going to have to figure out how to create content that gets forwarded and read.
3. Cells phones are no longer a device we use, they have become an extension of ourselves. Yes we use computers, iPads, etc., but the phone is how we plug in to the world. And as such, it’s where we will be receiving most of the news we read. Content optimized for this form factor and delivery channel will dominate.
4. We will all have a personalized news feed (for lack of a better term as most will see it just as additional information they get over the course of the day). This will even further segment us as no two people will read the same set of news.

There’s a lot more we’ll see change because of this. But I think we will see most existing content providers go out of business. Not just news organizations, but record labels, movie studios, TV broadcasters, book publishers – across the board. Most are still half fighting the changes so far and half trying to force their physical model onto a web page – and failing at both. The world’s changing ever faster and outrunning the old businesses at a greater and greater rate.

On the plus side, new companies are coming along to step in and take advantage of the opportunity change provides. I think 10, 20, 30 years from now we’ll have quality news providers, quality songs, movies, and books all being produced. I think the people producing it will make a good living. But the mechanism will be very different from today and the giant companies that were the middleman/gatekeeper for all of this will be replaced (or for a few, radically changed).

 Loading ...