It's news, but not as we know it

8 November 2007

New methods of story-telling are opening up a variety of opportunities to traditional media - as long as they are receptive to new ideas as Simon van Wyk writes.

On those odd occasions when I take public transport, it seems to be a quieter experience these days. One of the joys of the iPod revolution is that an amazingly high number of people now sit quietly on public transport, with white earplugs jammed into their ears.

A couple of years ago they had a phone stuck to the side of their head while everyone around them could hear half of a private conversation. They've still got their mobiles, but now they hold them in front of them while they text, their heads slowly bopping to the music.

Their information-gathering is personal - my music, my conversations with my network. A few years ago (before mobile phones), most people on public transport would read a newspaper. Today, newspapers are something read by (shudder) old people.

There has been a seismic generational shift in the way people gather information about the world. A recent survey by the Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics & Public Policy asked Generation Y - people under 30 - about their relationship with the news, and concluded that they don't have one. They don't read newspapers, they don't watch TV news or listen to news radio, they're not even reading much news online.

Academic David Mindich writes that a survey conducted back in 2003 found that even back then the median viewer age of CNN and network TV news had risen to about 60 years, while only 11% of 18-to-24-year-olds listed news as a major reason for going online.

Falling through the news

As a result, it is no surprise that pundits such as Veronis Suhler Stevenson predict that the Internet will surpass newspapers as the biggest advertising medium by 2011.

So where is generation Y getting its news and information? They're not browsing for it anymore, via traditional newspapers and TV new broadcasts. They're searching for it, looking it up on Google.

Patrick Spain, CEO of Highbeam Research, was quoted recently in Vanity Fair as saying that the rise of the Internet has altered the basic news metaphor.

That metaphor - used ever since newspapers rose to prominence during the Industrial Revolution, continuing from print to radio to network television to cable television - has been the concept of the inverted pyramid, or the front page: give people the important info first.

Now, Spain says, the metaphor "should have to do now with falling through something, or floating through the totality of information or of intersecting worlds and interests."

That same article quotes wiki software maker Joe Kraus, who says, "The old media model was: there is one source of truth. The new media model is: there are multiple sources of truth, and we will sort it out."

In the words of David Sifry, founder of blog search engine Technorati, one-to-many "lectures" (i.e., from media companies to their audiences) are transformed into "conversations" among "the people formerly known as the audience". This former audience has changed from being consumers to 'prosumers', a term coined by futurist Alvin Toffler back in 1980.

Matthew Allen from Curtin University, who is currently president of the international Association of Internet Researchers, says that the biggest impact of the Internet has been to create a new media audience, with three key characteristics:

Interaction is the new content: as opposed to the previously dominant processes of creation, distribution, reception or discussion of content
Distracted and fascinated: the rise of user or audience behaviours that embody much greater levels of engagement with media, while at the same time reflecting an attitude in which users are easily distracted
You can get it for free: media consumers understand that while some media and some information must be, should be and often is paid for, that equivalent, similar or better media and information products can be obtained at no apparent or extra cost

Getting with the program

Unfortunately, news organisations are struggling with these changes, and many are responding by circling the wagons and trying desperately to defend their turf.

Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism think tank, wrote an article recently where he called on journalists to stop reading their own newspapers online and start buying more subscriptions to the paper version in order to save their profession.

Ironically, he published his article on the Poynter Online website, not in print, and in true new media fashion he was roundly criticised by professional colleagues who posted hundreds of comments on his piece. As one of them pointed out, his call to action was like Kodak begging its employees to buy more film-based cameras to fight off the threat of digital imaging - that didn't work, either.

The other response of traditional news organisations to the Internet has been to, as Michael Wolff writes in Vanity Fair, "shovel their paper or broadcast content online, which is something like filming live theatre and calling it a movie."

However, examples are emerging of media organisations taking up the challenge of the Internet and adapting their thinking to fit the emerging new model.

A key part of making the transition from traditional news to new media thinking is to understand the Internet "not as a publishing phenomenon but a social phenomenon," according to David Weinberger, Harvard lecturer and blogger.

The rise of 'citizen journalism' is an example of this. Many media outlets, from community newspapers to national networks, are encouraging readers to submit stories, photos and video which are published under their brand. It's highly interactive and flexible (we won't talk about how much money they save on trained journalists).

The addition of journalists' blogs and entertainment and food review lists to news sites is an obvious way of encouraging interaction. But the really interesting work is happening with people prepared to think outside of the box.

For example, US writer and educator Kim Pearson is working with a computer scientist to create a Web-based content management system with a back-end interface that allows storytellers to populate a database with clusters of content, along with a script that organises the content elements into multiple story lines.

Pearson says that this will "allow journalists to create immersive, multi-threaded non-fiction narratives. Readers could "wend their own ways through the stories of the protagonists of a complex tale such as Hiroshima amid a dynamic tableau of sites, sounds and contextual data about the city and the atomic bomb that felled it. I'm not talking about clicking through a Web site - I'm talking about fully realised stories, with character development and a clear, evocative narrative."

In a less earnest vein, a concrete example of interactive story-telling is The Great Turtle Race. Set up by a group of scientists and writers, it followed the trek of 11 leatherback turtles from their home in Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands, a pilgrimage they make each April.

Sporting animated maps with up-to-the-minute updates provided by satellite tags on the turtles, the team set up a series of blogs, MySpace pages for the turtles (one turtle gathered 232 friends), video and charts, etc. It even had a business model: companies including a Chinese tyre manufacturer paid $25,000 each to sponsor a turtle. The money paid for the satellite tags and went into a fund to buy parts of the turtles' nesting beach.

As site editor Jane Stevens said, "Fifteen years ago, if I had done a story about the plight of the gigantic, ancient Pacific leatherback turtles, 90 percent of whose numbers have disappeared over the last 10 years, it would have appeared as a 4,000-word magazine article." Instead, The Great Turtle Race site was visited by more than 650,000 unique visitors.

Stevens argues that "explanatory science journalism in particular can use games (in this case, a race) and social networking, as well as multimedia storytelling to provide useful and engaging information."

Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future predicts that the online media revolution will bring about a "Cambrian explosion" of creativity, the new media equivalent of the burst of new species that flourished 530 million years ago.

Look for more of these types of sites to develop as this new story-telling medium evolves.

Simon van Wyk is the founder of HotHouse Interactive.

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