The Future Of News
Predictions come cheap, but here's a new one: You know now a lot of web browsers – or sites, even, like Google Maps – have a function where you can zoom in or zoom out, according to a sliding scale? Imagine being able to do that for the "weight" of your news content.
Michael Wolff has a fascinating read in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair, where he discusses how, historically, each new medium has created its own version of news. – and that we're still waiting for how the Internet is going to "do" news. He talks about how software types and media people have regular conference calls to try to wrap their heads around the future of online news.
Yet I understand that these incredibly unresponsive people may well possess untapped magic that, if they wanted to, could make for all sorts of wondrous tricks which might save the news.So, basically, what these people are considering, is a news source that can be calibrated to your appetite at that moment. Slide your bar – on the seriousness scale – from 10 to 8 and your headlines will lighten from Darfur to the campaign trail; slide it a bit further and you'll be seeing Letterman mock the candidates. Slide it all the way and you'll be watching the Chris Crocker types of the world. (And let's sidestep, just for now, the cynical/jaded/realistic question of "would heavy news get phased out for lack of use?")"What about a sliding bar?" Mike Wu, a software engineer, offers just a little grudgingly. "Like from hard to soft news. So you can set it where you want to?"
"Really? From serious broadsheet to scandalous tabloid?" I wonder if this plasticity is miraculous or ludicrous. "From Ben Bernanke to Paris Hilton. And could this work, from unreconstructed crypto-Fascist religious right to loony absolutist left?"
"If we get the algorithm right."
Can the A-word save the news? Because, in its various current forms, the news—as a habituating, slightly fetishistic, more or less entertaining experience that defines a broad common interest—is ending. Newspapers, the network evening news, newsmagazines, even 24-hour cable news channels, these providers and packagers of the news, are imperiled media (even if Murdoch has spent $5 billion on The Wall Street Journal). The news is technologically obsolete—information envelops us, competing for our attention, hence fewer and fewer people (read: younger people) feel any need to seek it out.
When TV news first came onto the scene, it was in the form of people reading news off a sheet of paper, eyes down. They were doing a radio broadcast with a camera in the room. It didn't mature into what we now consider television news until years later. In 2007, we're still at that point with Internet news – it's basically broadsheet news copied onto your computer screen. But with streaming video and audio and interactivity maturing, we may be on the verge of a new era in news.
I don't know much about algorithms – biorhythms, sure, but not algorithms – but I do know that Internet speeds (broadband, DSL, etc.) and people's awareness of and appetite for converging media forms (picture, audio, print, video) is getting to the point where we may be ready for The Next Big Thing.
And a sliding scale might just be the beginning.