Steven John­son of outside.in talks about “The Ecosys­tem of News” and “old growth media”. This live blog post is mostly para­phrased:

It is now con­ven­tional wis­dom that the news­pa­per as we have come to know it for last cen­tury is over, or will be in a mat­ter of years. The ques­tion is whether we’re going to spend our time griev­ing over the loss, or whether we’re going to use this moment as an oppor­tu­nity to invent some­thing even bet­ter. We’re inevitably mov­ing from the “paper of record” model to a some­thing more dis­trib­uted, a news ecosys­tem, but that doesn’t mean we can’t con­sciously define the shape of that sys­tem. So let’s fig­ure out what val­ues we want to pre­serve from the older news­pa­per par­a­digm, and what val­ues we want to improve upon — and then let’s go build it!

To under­stand the future of news, you need to look at the past. If you wanted to find out news about the Mac in the 80’s and 90’s, you read Mac­World; only break­ing news would make it to the New York Times. In the early 90’s, the chan­nels started to widen, and a few years later, the web arrived. New Apple sites started pop­ping up and later Apple brought out its own offi­cial web­sites. Nowa­days, there is a huge diver­sity of infor­ma­tion about Apple … and the lag to get new infor­ma­tion is sec­onds. The level of sophis­ti­ca­tion of blog posts also far exceed what any news­pa­per would even attempt.

The metaphors we’ve used for the changes in media tell us a lot about the changes going on. Ecosys­tem is a good metaphor: it’s com­plex and dif­fer­ent from an assem­bly line. Yesterday’s ecosys­tem is a bar­ren desert and today’s is a thriv­ing jun­gle. This is a good indi­ca­tor of the future of the news information.

Peo­ple are pan­ick­ing about two things:  1) news orga­ni­za­tions are going to dis­ap­pear and 2) impor­tant bits of infor­ma­tion, ie., “news”, will dis­ap­pear as well. Peo­ple decry the alleged demise of war report­ing and of inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ism: blog­gers are not likely to get out of their paja­mas to report on these things. The web doesn’t have an intrin­sic abil­ity to cover news bet­ter; it just cov­ers news faster.

But now think about the ecosys­tem of polit­i­cal news dur­ing the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion: polit­i­cal blogs like Dai­lyKos to YouTube, Twit­ter, Face­book and the can­di­dates’ own web­sites, all the news was well cov­ered … and in fact, thrived online. There are more per­spec­tive, depth, and sur­face now.

Really, we now real­ize we were liv­ing in a desert dis­guised as a rainforest!

When you pick up the New York Times, there are only a few sto­ries you are inter­ested in. But when you walk in your neigh­bor­hood, there are dozens of sto­ries you would like to know bet­ter … and that will never be cov­ered in the NYT. This is the long tail and the Times will never even attempt this. And this is what the best can do. In fact, the Times itself is now launch­ing local Brook­lyn blogs.

We have grown from read­ing Mac­World to expect­ing to see an instant keynote of Steve Jobs. We take it for granted that we can do things like geo­t­ag­ging news … but the old growth media did not bring this to us.

It is pos­si­ble that inves­tiga­tive report­ing will not thrive. On the other hand, the new ecosys­tem may free up tra­di­tional media to do what they do best: war report­ing and muckracking.

There is an objec­tion to the ecosys­tem of news model: it is com­plex and there is more noise than ever before. Can we expect the gen­eral pub­lic to nav­i­gate the new ecosys­tem with the same skill and dis­cre­tion (and dig­i­tal lit­er­acy) as we can?

The funny thing about the news­pa­per today is that their online audi­ence is grow­ing faster than their print cir­cu­la­tion is shrink­ing. Mea­sured by pure audi­ence inter­est, news­pa­pers have never been more relevant.

The implied model of every news orga­ni­za­tion is “all the news that’s fit to link”.

The ecosys­tem of news model pre­dicts we will have a layer of “NEWS”:

• Pro­fes­sional journalists
• Pro­fes­sional bloggers
• Non-profit jour­nal­ists
• Ama­teur bloggers
• Direct events
• Pub­lic data — API’s (every local gov­ern­ment will have an API to its own data)

and a layer of “COMMENTARY”:

• Pun­dits / Columnists
• Blog­gers
• Schol­ars

and a layer of “CURATION” (ie., of decid­ing what’s good or not):

• Social Media
• Pro­fes­sional Editors
• Aggre­ga­tors
• Group fil­ters

and a layer of “DISTRIBUTION”:

• Tra­di­tional media
• Aggre­ga­tors
• Viral word of mouth

The tragedy now is that the finan­cial melt­down and some over lever­ag­ing by news orga­ni­za­tions is cram­ming what should have been a decade-long tran­si­tion into the space of just a few years. This is a tragedy for two rea­sons. First, it inflicts a lot of stress and dam­age on news pro­fes­sion­als who are doing excel­lent work. Also, it dis­tracts us from build­ing the new model by attempt­ing to shore up the failed model of the old growth media.

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