Is the news industry crisis fundamentally about a mutual lack of trust?

| 08-09-2009| Business & Investing • Language & Communication

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Readers don’t trust newspapers or big media to properly inform and guide their reading and news consumption anymore and newspapers and media sites don’t trust their readers enough to send them to other resources on the web without fear of them disappearing forever.

A newspaper was always about intelligent thought and reading a good summary of what was going on in the world. You felt informed. Or at least you told yourself you did. Then the internet came along and we learnt that there were lots more relevant facts and opinions out there that newspapers hadn’t told us about.

There is still an opportunity for someone to do good editorial

If I read a quality print newspaper today, I often feel more informed about the world than if I sit down and read on for an hour on the internet. On the internet I read narrowly whereas a good quality print newspaper still allows me to read more widely in that limited time.

Could the fundamental problem with newspapers (or media web sites) be a lack of trust in their editorial judgement and execution?

The realisation that newspapers weren’t telling us the whole truth, that they weren’t helping us understand all the angles to a story, led us to try and make it up ourselves, especially when driven to do so by corporate or government biased news agendas which are pushed to make us believe one version or another of an issue.

In the future, there will only be even more access to even more information as social sharing, basic and broadband internet access, translation and mobile technologies and citizen journalism increase.

Somewhere during the birth of the Internet, newspapers also lost their way in terms of giving us a good summary – they thought the size and reach of the internet meant they could start trying to tell us about everything, and not trying to inform us about the really important stuff.

It’s great that there are 4,638 stories about Obama’s education plan somewhere on the web, but most of us will probably not even begin to start taking time to search through them all.

You want me to search through 4600 articles?

I want someone to give me the ten or fifteen most important, insightful, funny, outrageous articles related to this story so I can understand the different points of view in as short a time as possible.

This is where editorial selection comes in because normal people don’t know what RSS is, never mind how to use it effectively, and those who do are only experimenting to try and answer one question: what’s important in my world?

Maybe the first newspapers to successfully go back to – or to present for the first time if they’re just getting started – a radically more reductionist news philosophy will win.

If a news organisation could win my trust for its good judgement and present me with, say, the top ten articles from around the web that I really, really should spend my daily hour of news-reading on, I would sign up. I might even pay for it if it was good enough and it was going to save me time and effort as well as increase my understanding.

Don’t worry about me not coming back if where you send me to is worthy of my time and attention. Google News basically just sends people away but it doesn’t do editorial. Drudge just sends people away and he clearly has a bias, but that’s okay. The Economist is good at editorial, at summarising events and at making me feel like they take lots of relevant things into account before sitting down to write , which is why it’s doing well I think. It doesn’t link and send me to other interesting places though.

I don’t think Google News is the news industry’s biggest problem right now, nor are news voting sites like Digg or social networking sites like Facebook – which are more like the 21st Century social version of newsboys on the street corner shouting ‘Extra, extra!‘. Serious investigative reporting isn’t the answer either (but that’s another post, I think).

Google News, Digg and even Facebook are alternatives that millions of people are currently exploring in terms of news consumption but the question they answer is ‘What’s interesting?‘. They cannot consistently answer the question ‘What’s important?‘, which is what I really want to know.

That opportunity is out there for someone.