Higher quality doesn’t always lead to a larger audience. We know that was true with traditional media. Charlie Rose is less of a household name than Howard Stern, and Thelonious Monk CDs are more difficult to find on the shelves of brick-and-mortar outlets than Mötley Crüe’s greatest hits.
It’s not surprising that we can apply this concept to online news as well. High-quality multimedia content doesn’t necessarily increase site traffic. In fact, audience analysis of online news often results in contradictory findings, as Regina McCombs of the Poynter Institute reports.
In college media, stories that are high in conflict usually generate the most traffic and comments. Much like compounding interest in financial terms, a heavily commented story often feeds itself for two or three weeks as readers return to check out the latest comments.
As a publications adviser for college students, I worry that students may dwell on these statistics and conclude that controversy, not quality, is the best way to ensure a future for journalism. Why should they spend a week or two planning a multimedia package when a hastily written opinion piece on a hot-button topic will generate more readership?
The debate, as it so often does in mass media, centers on ethics. The online environment really hasn’t changed that.
Increasingly, the ethical challenge for bloggers and news aggregators is to riff off but not rip off other people’s work. This brings us to newser.com, a site that summarizes news stories for those of us who want to “read less” and “know more.”
Of course, by riffing/ripping off more traditional news sources, newser.com draws plenty of criticism. The site acknowledges its sources, but it is designed so that the casual site visitor likely will not feel the need to leave the newser.com shell.
If newser.com becomes immensely successful, smaller local organizations probably won’t feel the pinch as much as larger sites and news services. As long as most news content on the Web remains free, big media outlets such as the New York Times, Associated Press and MSNBC will fight a battle similar to what recording companies fought with music file-sharing services such as the original version of Napster. Can I borrow news stories from a friend much like I borrow music from a friend?
Many media analysts blame the demise of newspapers on the industry’s late entry into online journalism. They argue that most newspaper owners were too set in their printing press ways and failed to realize the economic threat of the Internet.
Today, as many newspaper executives spend increasing amounts of capital on Web site development, I wonder how many of them have considered that stand-alone Web sites could soon die a similar death as ink-on-paper editions.
With so much traffic driven by social networks, the most obvious being Facebook and Twitter, it’s not hard to imagine a day when most readers rarely visit stand-alone news sites. It’s also not hard to imagine mobile devices with custom feeds that users set to receive news on selected topics. It’s truly not hard to imagine because a few tech-savvy folks already consume their news this way.
What does this mean for local newspapers that want to establish brand loyalty with readers? It could mean that the economic model for the future will rely on charging readers a few pennies per story via some sort of online accounting system. Charging a monthly subscription fee for access to a stand-alone site probably won’t interest enough consumers. And it’s difficult to understand the economic viability of online content continuing to be free for everyone.
I’m no media prophet, so I won’t predict the imminent death of dotcom journalism. But I sense its life expectancy may be decreasing.
The phrase “augmented reality” sounds like a convenient euphemism for hallucinogenic drugs, but it may best be described as putting captions on the real world.
Cell phones already seem like they are merely extensions of our hands. Augmented reality software could make some rabid users want to embed the devices surgically into their palms. In theory, augmented reality could soon alter our sensory processing of the physical world.
For teenagers who are already accustomed to non-stop texting, this could merely be the next step in a logical evolution. I supposed in its most simple uses on a cell phone, augmented reality is not much different than reading a map. I’m not ready for a 3-D reading experience that requires high-tech goggles, though.
For now, I’ll mentally compose my own biased captions as I process the physical world around me. I vaguely remember playing in bands many years ago that attempted to augment reality.
