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“I have been thinking that the newspapers have got it right! Only the popular topics gets all the hits… The rest get… well… just the spill overs.”

He is right on one part, but oh so wrong…

The news papers and media in the US today predominantly covers entertainment news, and very little international news. In Feburary 2007, the coverage was around 79% US news. The remaining 21% was dominated by coverage of the situation in Iraq. Here is the really scary part: “The combined coverage of Russia, China and India, for example, reached just 1%.” We all know about the BRIC countries and their influence over the world economy today and in the future. Does it really make sense to have such a infinitesimal coverage of these big forces? Not to mention the non-existing coverage of the natural resource intense fourth BRIC country Brazil. I won’t go in to a international policy discussion about the reasons behind it here, even though it is an interesting angle.

The world becomes more and more flat. The borders - geographical, political, ethnical, cultural and religious - are becoming more and more fuzzy to even non-existing. We are living in a global society. The issues we have to tackle are predominantly global and multifaceted. They have to be solved and understood by us all, together as one society. At the same time the media who should cover this is decreasing their international covering staff by around 50% already. We are witnessing a very dangerous development from a societal growth perspective.

I came to Stanford back in 2005 with the task to figure out ways to increase the coverage in troubled areas and it became obvious that the web as a distribution channel was not the issue. It was the lack of coverage of the events taking place. The few journalists there were getting killed, threaten or in some way worse stopped from covering the events on-the-ground. Today in the US we see an increasing number of unemployed, in many ways suffering core of journalist, photographers, video makers and other media workers. The industry is seriously wounded. Any organism, organization or company will in the state of being wounded turn to survival mode and the quick fix. It is about surviving for the moment. Go for the easy win. In here lies the reasons for the media business trend, as well as we as consumers have very few other alternatives at the moment.

The reality however is that the web has forever changed the possible revenue models for news papers and the media business in general. The music industry got their piece of this change first. The time has come for the news media business to realize that the era of the traditional media is gone. A lot of the revenue streams have for news companies come from either the classified (in the printed editions) or for the big news agencies syndication of content. Look at Reuters for instance who earn their revenue from financial data, not their news arm, where you need accurate massaged data to make balanced and accurate decisions. Syndication is an ancient, today non-working and dysfunctional solution. The freedom of content - both on the publishing and consumption side - on the web these days make syndication notoriously hard, or let us be honest impossible in the traditional sense. The news media industry is starting to realize this fact.

Syndication models work well if you have access to purely unique content for which people are willing to pay for. These days you have to have the emotional and human touch to it. It needs to have that little extra. It needs the entertainment value. Content has a life cycle of it’s own and the value of content is pretty much built up by it’s freshness (how breaking is the content), how unique is it, and how emotional the content is. Breaking news content will always be in high demand. The life time and stickiness of the content increases as you add supporting material such as context and opinions, and provide the audience with the capability of interacting with the content.

Wait a minute! Can you not get this via a traditional media model? Sure you can, but it will cost you as content creation is incredibly expensive. It will cost you, it will cost you a lot. You will have large head counts, which lead to large expenses, and the margins for content are not there anymore. Charging for content clearly does not work in the web era where everything should be free, at least on the surface. Should it be free? That’s another question, but it is naive to think that will change either. The unconstrained, immediate distribution of content online have set a stage where you need small slim organizations, that let the content flow freely. The era of the “walled gardens” is forever over, even though the cellphone business is still stubbornly fighting this trend. Remarkably, even the cellphone industry has started to realize the absurdness of the fight, and probably already realize that it is lost already. The model for the future has been set. We as a media consumption society shaped it- for good and bad.

The option left is to adapt as in all paradigm shifts. We should just realize that we have entered a completely new era of media. A more exciting. A more dynamic. A more un-predictable. A more interactive. Yeah! Where do I buy the ticket to tag along on the ride? I want in on this ride!

How do you do this? You turn to multipurpose, flexible and moldable solutions. This is surely nothing new as all big changes throughout history have come from such solutions. You have the steam engine. Multipurpose. You have the PC. Multipurpose device. You have Microsoft Office (regardless what you think of Microsoft). A multipurpose package to solve most of your needs. On the web you have YouTube. A multipurpose video sharing site. You also have Flickr. A multipurpose photo site. The list goes on. Now in here the opportunity lies. The opportunity of changing the news business to something the world has never seen before. The opportunity is to create a multipurpose news media platform where anyone can publish, any one can share any piece of content and anyone can discuss it? The opportunity is the creation of a multipurpose news platform. To use some buzz words the ultimate social media mashup experience. Wouldn’t that be awesome and cool? It sure would be.

Now to the really, really cool part. It exists. I will get back to why after I have laid out some of the main issues you face in any long tail media application or site.

First, let us take a brief look at the coverage issues laid out initially about the skewed news coverage in the US. The main issue with the traditional media model is that is completely incapable of catching the long tail market of any component of the long tail. Again the cost is one of the main reasons, but also the traditional editor model will never be able handle the vast amount of content produced in the long tail. Today’s media market is all about content packaging as the entry barrier for content publishing and creation is in every mans hand. The explosion of cellphones and the incredible growth of the web has enabled anyone to become a reporter, an opinion maker or just enable anyone to share their voice. The birth of citizen reporting or as I see it sharing of their voices and opinions is made possible by the access of publishing technology for no cost especially since web space is incredible cheap these days. The long tail encompasses a lot of challenges such as How do you navigate through the vast amount of information? How do you explain and make the relation between the different content pieces obvious?

Moving forward in the media and news business, the game to play is about content packaging. How do you relate traditional media content and marry it with user generated content and other related content? How do we combine and package this content to make sense out of it and make it digestible for a normal content consumer? Technology is again the answer with the guidance of a community. The main issue throughout time has been to efficiently validate content - user generated or not. Positioning yourself as trying to take on the task of covering the long tail you expose yourself for a large discussion about quality assurance as for any process aiming to substitute humans with machines. In traditional media, human editors have been used as the major part of the content quality assurance process. This is not a scalable solution and never will be a scalable solution. Why? They all rely on a human decision at some stage of the process, and consequently, there will always be a scaling limit even though the associated cost is lowered or at least not increasing. Furthermore the traditional editing model via human editors has furthermore been proven to have some concerning issues especially for high profile news stories/events. The vast number of surfaced staged photographs published by for instance AP, Reuters and NYT via their photographers during the conflict in Lebanon 2006, as well as the plagiarized and fabricated stories by the NYT-journalist Jayson Blair have really seeded doubts that human editors/journalists are really the solely solution on the long term. Not to mention the issues with the super editors in Wikipedia.

The solution is clearly a never seen combination of Wikipedia and Google. You use the community to drive the content creation and use technology to guide the community and fill the gaps in where the community fails to fill in the gaps. You create the rewarding dance between the community and technology. Letting them interact and learn from each other. The secret lies in a free publishing model together with providing the context via aggregation and contribution and ranking the content based on validating elements.

The solution becomes simple in it’s core, but technology heavy, community and participation intense. It becomes the ultimate mashup between traditional and user generated media. It is allvoices.com (a company I co-founded). Shortly, there are three main components to the site:

• Report - Anyone can report from anywhere via cellphone or PC, sharing news, images, videos and opinions.
• Related voices - Weaving together multiple perspectives:
  • News stories
  • Blog posts
  • Images
  • Videos

  via contributors and aggregation.

• Discuss - Emotionally connect with other voices around the world through discussion and complete the human story.

The free publishing of the Report by any means - web, SMS/MMS or email - is central, especially as it should not be “controlled”, “checked”, or especially edited before it is published. If you share your voice, it should be your voice. When you hit the Post-button, the content should be published. The Related voices is the most technology intense component and is central for the validation of the content. By looking for validating content, the context around the report is also built helping the consumer to understand the report and to fill in any gaps in the report. All these components the human side of the story and the context built up by other users contributions and aggregation will provide the user with the grounds for a well-grounded Discussion. You will have all the angles and opinions right there for you to react on and to share with others. The social networking and community aspect of the news creation, consumption and interaction is central and key. It brings more life to the content and makes it more engaging.

Now that’s cool. Very cool. Especially since it brings the media arena to a new level. A whole new level.

Currently the world have been struck by the events in Tibet, where the recent provocations by the Chinese government has stunned the world once again. As an example for how this interaction can become and how rich the discussion can become here is an example: Tibet is Chinese for Palestine. By reading the comments you see that the whole world is participating in the event and a global dialogue emerges. That is the very cool piece of it.

This is also why this forum is needed where you can express yourself - unedited, unmediated and in context of an event.

I posted a comment on MediaShift on the importance of local news. I thought I’d share it here as well.
It has been clear for a long time that local news is getting more and more prime real estate at any media site, and that the demand for local news is increasing. I read an IDC report last year that spoke about the rise of the local news throught the media sphere.

Personally I think we are moving towards a more localized perspective of any news story. Local news with the proper supporting context is the future. We are moving more towards the mosaic-like presentation where the reader gets all the different angles, twists of the story. The time for the single news story is out and the time has come for the engaging multidiverse news stories. Here I feel many UGC sites still lacks the proper execution. We do not give the UGC accounts the proper real estate at the sites and/or the proper supporting material - perspectives, facts or presentations.

Interesting enough, many people forget that all news is local until media makes it global. News is more or less exclusively local until we as a community makes the local news (event) global by raising the dialogue to a national, regional or global level. Therefore it has always surprised me that we tend to forget the localized perspective of the news stories. Over localizing news such as many UGC sites are currently doing actually makes the news loose the context and becomes uninteresting for most people.

The second interesting fact about local news is that they should be told by the locals, the people who experience the news. We want the real accounts. We need real people to share their views about what they experience locally. That is where this should go like. I know this was spoken about earlier this year here at the Mediashift blog. The cellphone component is here of tremendous importance.

Before I come into too many angles of the subject I think we will see a development where the news transforms into the localized, national, regional and global perspective, yet showing the connection between these different levels guiding the reader what the news really is. In there lies the engagement level ofn the reader and opens up for a whole new set of digestion and participation of news.

A friend asked me this, this weekend. My answer was that I do not believe that to be the case but democracy is still indisputable the only path to go. The reason being very simple. Democracy relies on the consensus of humans and that has been proven to be hard. Even within a tight group you might experience some very strange sociological effects proven via studies. For instance without doing any major buy-in into the has been recently identified even in the field of social media. (http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html) Here is an attempt to shed some light on my beliefs in the area not claiming to put any big justice to the discussion.Let us first define the term democracy in which form I would choose to use it here. Democracy in my eyes and in it’s purest form is consensus decisions for any question, topic or issue a group should address.

Clear directions are the most important thing in any decision process. If the direction the group should go in is unclear in any way the group usually gets lost until the direction has been made clear again. In a consensus driven decision process the direction might be built up over time and the community/society needs to go through the pain of having vague to no idea what the direction might be. During this time the good faith of the group must prevail. Therefore, a consensus driven process puts a tremendous faith in the individual and their willingness to align themselves into the group consensus decision. Funny enough the absolute majority of the group will in the general case not get their will through which might be unsatisfying to the group as a whole.

Related here is something very important to the global society of today. The society needs to be willing to accept the direction as well. This could be argued to be part of the decision process, but I choose to refer to this as a separate component of the decision process. For instance let us look at Iraq today, Vietnam in the 70:s or even the shattered Germany after the Versailles peace. All these examples point to the fact that “democracy” can never be forced upon a society if the society is not ready for it of various reasons and that creating a vacuum in the society as for leadership and direction is extremely dangerous. This is of course a dramatic over simplification of the situation as it has many facets and angles which I do not necessarily consider in this argument.

It can however be concluded that different types levels of leaderships is required to keep the society on the “right” progress path depending on the circumstances in the society. What a “right” societal progress path really means is a challenging concept in itself but let us be a bit loose here in our definition. I will make the argument that under extreme circumstances the flock or the society will look for a very clear direction and that normally means looking for a leader to give them direction. A strong leadership does not necessarily mean that we are looking at an undemocratic path it is more a matter of guiding the society towards the future. The complexity here is that leaders can either be parasitizing on or guiding the society. You can either have a Churchill or a Stalin. This will tie into the responsibilities of the individuals to questions their leaders and the direction.

Basically the more you look at this it all comes down to the individual. The individual in all democratic societies has both rights and responsibilities. This is a pretty broad discussion on the structure of the society. I will therefore focus on the responsibility of the individual in representative democracy and only scratch the surface. The hypothesis of representative democracy is that the elected representatives is a reflection of the society. I find it hard to claim that it will generally be the case in the structural form of representative democracy as we have define it today. Others have claimed that it is a case of only having representatives open and competent enough to understand what the society they lead wants. They are right and wrong at the same time, but again it comes down to the individual and what responsibility that person has.

Representatives as the rest of us are colored by their own opinions, their own biasses and beliefs. We all have a level of subjectiveness where we project our own beliefs on top of any information we collect. We can learn to be more or less biased but basically I think we should just accept the fact that we are biased by nature. In the collection of these biasses lies the truth. (I do not think this is anything but something very human and nothing sad in any way. In fact that is what makes humans interesting - the differences. We should embrace those.)

It all comes down to the fact that each and every individual of any society have fundamentally two responsibilities:

1. They should all participate in free elections where you have enough choices and openness for debate (what defines a free election in itself is an interesting topic that I will leave out here.)
2. They should also be active in controlling their elected representatives. Here media plays an important part of course but the media should be free, and diverse.

Looking around the world we see a lot of issues with both these fundamental points. In Europe amongst other things, we have seen issues with falling voting numbers which in itself means that the elected representatives are not very representative for the society. Many claim that the unwillingness to vote is the lack of differentiating elements between the alternatives which has lead to a strive to move towards the extreme and tragically for Europe with its history to the ultra right wing. We also see passiveness to question where we are going or taking an active part of controlling where we are going or trying to change it for the better due to pure laziness, inabilities or just pure lack of information. This issue is in my eyes spreading around the world and hence a free, diverse and multifaceted media is a very essential part and sadly also mostly overlooked around the world. Historically this as most issues around is nothing new and known facts. Free media and universities are the first targets to strike down on when trying to gain control over any society. The examples are many: Russia, China, Europe during the early civilization here and Germany before World War II.

When you look at this on the high level you can therefore see that the challenge here is the nature of the human itself than in some ways will counteract the very nature of democracy. In fact I argue that it is this very tension between the will of the individuals and the collective will of the society is the seed for progress and necessary.

It all comes back to one ironic thing: The key to democracy is the individual and their willingness for democracy.

I read this column by Nicholas Carr in Forbes. For sure software and the whole internet is moving more towards a media focus. Interesting indeed.