Video Killed the Radio Star
Right now on screen, we’re watching a series of images, interspersed with words, Lessig-poetry-slam-style. “Change.” We’re set up like the UN, with one person walking around in the middle. Talking about how to get people who are younger to pick up the paper. Oliver is responding to this saying that the paper has only so much info, and as a media consumer, he wants the source, but wants to see more info than can fit in the paper, and he doesn’t want to kill trees. Dan Gillmor responds that it’s a damned good argument, and he hopes it will get solved. But there is a need for traditional reporting, for the deep investigation (funding, editing, distribution). Dan and I had dinner last night and spent a lot of time talking about how blogs need traditional journalism and journalism needs blogs, and the biz model is kind of a mess for newspapers, as well as those that rely on newspapers like the wire services.
Oliver/Kos says I haven’t seen anything since Watergate that warrants going to a paper. He wants to go to a blogger on music or movies for that.
Esther Dyson is saying there are two arguments: online verses paper, and traditional verses non-traditional. Leave the dead-tree argument behind.
Interesting discussion, though I have to say that just having completed a study of 30 people, asking about their news and search habits, seeing the results, it’s not that people don’t want news, but they want it another way than traditional news is used to giving it. Of these people, 60% were under 35, 40% were 36-70. The average self-reported news consumption was 45 minutes a day, and while they occasionally look at papers when on BART or out, they reported that they do this consuming online. Every one said this. While people are notoriously bad at self-reporting, and the skew of the participants is that they are Craig’s List readers who have broadband at home, so it is a unique subset, it is still an amazing statistic.
And what they are describing up front here is a reflection of these always-on used-to-be-consumers but now they are building their own feeds people. People who want to get it how, when, where they want it. Untethered. Unencumbered. From lots of different sources. People who use blogs to filter their links and attention to manage the tremendous amount of information coming at us from traditional and non-traditional sources.
