What lies ahead for online news?
For WSJ.com’s 10th anniversary, users were asked to share their ideas for the perfect news site 10 years from now. Here’s what they said they want:
- Reliable filters to compensate for information overload.
- Mobile options for news and information. To go along with that, they want new mobile devices that have more memory storage, bigger screens, and better options for input.
- Customized aggregators — that’s not what WSJ.com called it, but a user wrote:
- Less interference from advertising. People come to a site to get particular stuff, and they see the obtrusive ads as obstacles in their path.
- User-based selection of top news. Apparently, many of the WSJ.com users think they would make better gatekeepers than the paid editors. One user wrote:
- Context and depth in news reporting. This does not mean “more long text stories” but rather “efficient ways to look up background information if I want it.”
- More audio and more video — tagged and searchable.
Instead of having to duplicate my holdings all over the Web so I can get customized news from various sources, I would login to my secure [brokerage] account and there I would find, alongside my portfolio, links to WSJ news and articles.
Instead of traditional news bureaus, a sophisticated network of freelancers, some with no journalistic experience, will act as correspondents, filing stories from computers inside their homes from around the world. The news will be more in depth, and news will be covered much faster.
None of this should be surprising to online journalists, but in my mind it raises the question: What are the major news organizations doing today to make it happen? A lot of this is about granularity and added value. Where is that in today’s online journalism?
Another question: What are the j-schools doing to prepare students for the new new journalism?
Technorati tags: online journalism | audiences | future
Leave a Reply