The amount of media that’s available to the average user is a vastly much larger superset than anything that’s ever existed in human history. If I was going to start a news business tomorrow, I would start a news business designed to produce not one new bit of news, but instead to aggregate news for individuals in ways that mattered to them.
Clay Shirky, May 2010
The new online publishing industry
In the face of these extraordinary economic times, in a devastated advertising climate, its clear publishers can no longer continue to fund vast amounts of researchers and writers.. Is the print sector dying or has it already reached its consolidation point? It seems the answer is unfolding in front of us, ironically in a very public way…
While Google, AOL and others are busy laying the foundations of their own newsrooms, entrepreneurs are going ahead and doing it on their own using unconventional techniques that make traditionalists shudder….
The publishing industry MUST find a new online model, and mass collaboration and participation is certainly a consideration – citizen journalism is an option that is already moving bloggers more directly into mainstream publishing channels, and increasingly new age digital publishers are recognising the power of the this new era of socialization.
Evolution
Some media owners, its seems, are making the move to protect their content. Personally I think they are in danger of missing a trick, after all the fundamental features of the internet are based on the openness of the web and our ability to access it. Of course how this evolutionary process develops depends on 4 key factors
- Economics
- Culture
- Politics
- Technology
The rise of facebook and socialization in general has changed the web in such a radical way that publishers MUST reinvent their business models to cater for an online audience that culturally is still evolving, in an economy that is volatile, with new technologies that are arriving daily and a political intervention that is seriously questioning privacy.
The point at which social media reaches its near maximisation point is when the semantic web is structured in such a way that we are able to ask for something extraordinarily specific and have clear results put in front of us. I wonder if the future of our publishing industry is heading this way… who will create the next Google and facebook empire?… the media sector is certainly well positioned to do so.. But do they have the insight to execute?….
Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world – A question Rupert Murdock has clearly asked himself….
Or just maybe a new publishing opportunity sits in front of us all?
M2rk's Blog 
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