The New(?) News Ecosystem. Hmm.

I was attending a session on the news ecosystem given by Steven Johnson at SXSW, and how it will be transformed. Most of what was said was not really something surprising, but he laid out the pieces pretty well. He identified four different steps: News creation, news commentary, news curation and news distribution.

Nothing new there really...

The future game of the media business is about content packaging, not creation and distribution. The creation has been taken cared of and will pre-dominantly be community-powered, yet supported by the traditional reporting investigative reporting style. The content distribution is really straightforward using the web, and with supporting paper editions and of course television (over time web-TV). The main disruptions here have been the open-source content management systems and blogging platforms. Putting up a website now is as simple as a few clicks. You are up and blogging in no-time and can start to share your opinions. Still you will have to maintain the site, which is time consuming. There are an enormous amount of sites providing possibilities for social bookmarking, multimedia upload and integration with your own site, which will help you in the promotional part yet it is yet spread out. In all honesty I would have to admit that learning content promotion is the toughest part and the biggest challenge for any blogger, photographer, video maker or any other content creator. It too many seems a bit like “black art”, and many layman content creators struggle here. Especially since it becomes too time consuming for average content contributor using their own platform.

There is definitely a crucial need on the media scene for a site such as Allvoices which takes on these tasks and package them into a destination site, where the time-consuming components of the news ecosystem are taken cared of.

The most common question and comment in the room focused on the need for compensation for the efforts of the content creator and community “editor”. Regardless how you construct the new news ecosystem, the essential question is really how to reward the contributors whether they are amateurs or professional journalists. The all need to be compensated in some way here. This is the main issue moving forward. How will the players and participants be rewarded?

The key to remember here is to under all circumstances avoid getting stuck in the “walled garden” mentality, which has predominantly been ruling on the media arena. The compensation of the model should be measured on the activity around the pieces not on the old nowadays out-dated per item pricing model for content. The new arena is open, constantly interacting and constantly evolving. The final printed story is not really here anymore. The article is live, evolving and always changing. Even though many older players on the market are trying to stop this evolution and I assure you it will not be very fruitful.

Let us adapt to the new arena and change the models – business and technology wise. That is why Allvoices is filling this need perfectly.