I’ve written a couple of guest posts for Nieman Journalism Lab and the tech news site Memeburn. The Nieman post is part of a series looking forward to 2012. I’m never a fan of futurology so I’ve cheated a little and talked about developments already in progress: new interface conventions in news websites; the rise of collaboration; and the skilling up of journalists in data.

Memeburn asked me a few months ago to write about social media’s impact on journalism’s role as the Fourth Estate, and it took me until this month to find the time to do so. Here’s the salient passage:

“But the power of the former audience is a power that needs to be held to account too, and the rise of liveblogging is teaching reporters how to do that: reacting not just to events on the ground, but the reporting of those events by the people taking part: demonstrators and police, parents and politicians all publishing their own version of events — leaving journalists to go beyond documenting what is happening, and instead confirming or debunking the rumours surrounding that.

“So the role of journalist is moving away from that of gatekeeper and — as Axel Bruns argues — towards that of gatewatcher: amplifying the voices that need to be heard, factchecking the MPs whose blogs are 70% fiction or the Facebook users scaremongering about paedophiles.

“But while we are still adapting to this power shift, we should also recognise that that power is still being fiercely fought-over. Old laws are being used in new ways; new laws are being proposed to reaffirm previous relationships. Some of these may benefit journalists — but ultimately not journalism, nor its fourth estate role. The journalists most keenly aware of this — Heather Brooke in her pursuit of freedom of information; Charles Arthur in his campaign to ‘Free Our Data’ — recognise that journalists’ biggest role as part of the fourth estate may well be to ensure that everyone has access to information that is of public interest, that we are free to discuss it and what it means, and that — in the words of Eric S. Raymond — “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow“.”

Comments, as always, very welcome.

Christmas gifts image by Michael Wyszomierski

This month’s Carnival of Journalism asks what journalists want for Christmas from programmers, and vice versa. Here’s my take.

Programmers and developers have already given journalists enough presents to last a century of Christmases. Programmers created content management systems and blogging platforms; they wrapped up networks of contacts in social networks, and parcelled up fast-moving updates on Twitter and SMS. They tied media in ribbons of metadata, making it easier to verify. They digitised content, making it possible to mix it with other content.

But I think it’s time for journalists to start giving back.

All of these gifts have made it easier for journalists to report stories. But that’s only part of publishing.

Technology’s place in journalism

Traditionally, journalism’s technology came after the story: sub-editors or designers laid the story out in the way they judged to be the most effective; printers gave it physical form; and distributors made sure it reached people.

Each stage in that process considers the next person. The inverted pyramid, for example, helps subs trim copy to fit available space. Subs talk to printers. Printers work with distributors. Processes are designed to reduce friction. The journalist’s work – whether they realise it or not – is a compromise reached over decades between different parties. An exchange of gifts, if you like.

But when it comes to publishing online, there’s been very little Christmas spirit.

Stories as a vehicle

Stories help us connect with current issues; they act as a vehicle for information that allows us to participate in society, whether that’s politically, socially, or economically.

The job of a journalist is to find stories in current events.

But those stories do not have to be told in one particular way. And if we were to try to tell them in some different ways (adding important metadata; publishing raw data; linking to supporting material; flagging false information), we could be giving a gift much desired by developers.

Here are some things that they could do with that gift – it is, if you like, my own fantasy Christmas list:

• Mark up factually false or misleading statements made by individuals or organisations, and highlight any instances of that statement in new coverage.
• Automatically update old ‘facts’ in the light of new information – and allow people to receive updates when those facts change.
• Link physical spaces to the past, present and future story of that space.
• Add contextual information on any individual mentioned in a story, for example a politician who receives payment from a particular industry
• Relate a story to the individual reading it
• Give users critical information about the source of particular information – beyond “Pictures from YouTube”
• Generate a hyperlinked sentiment analysis of coverage of politicians and corporations to complement factual data such as voting records.

They’re just ideas – and will remain so as long as journalists assume they’re only writing for newspapers, and newspaper readers.

The newspaper is a tool: a way for groups of people to exchange information. In the 19th century those groups might have been political activists, or merchants who needed to know the latest trading conditions.

The web is a tool too – a different tool. We can use it to ask information to come to us, or to seek out supplementary information; we can use it to draw connections; and we can act on what we find in the same space. Stories need to adapt to the possibilities of the new tool they sit in.

This year, put a developer on your Christmas list. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

The following is cross-posted from XCity Magazine, the student magazine for City University, where I teach online journalism. They asked me to look ahead 25 years. I barely think you can look five years ahead at the moment, but I agreed anyway. This is, of course, not meant to be taken seriously…

If you’d asked someone in 1986 to predict what journalism would be like now, you would have ended up with Michael J Fox playing a techno-draped future hack. In a flying car. And lots of fluorescent pink.

We have a tendency to cast the future as an exaggerated present. We give too much power to technology, and not enough to people. Any prediction I can come up with for 25 years’ time will, of course, say more about 2011 than 2036.

But there’s nothing like a challenge…

Prediction 1: People will still be predicting the death of newspapers

People have predicted the death of newspapers for as long as newspapers have faced competition from other media. But newspapers survive – not because they are a profitable business (although many have enjoyed enormous margins in the past), but because they offer benefits beyond the revenue from advertising and cover price.

Influence and status are hard to buy. As long as newspapers offer either, there will be proprietors willing to make a loss on the balance sheet, for benefits elsewhere.

Prediction 2: Prices will head in opposite directions

The launch of ShortList in 2007 will increasingly be seen as a turning point in the publishing industry. The magazine and its sister titles – along with the rise of free content online – have helped pioneer a change in the attitudes of advertisers to free titles. The Evening Standard has helped cement that. Free no longer means poor quality, or low engagement.

But there will be no such thing as a free lunch: ‘free’ content will actually be paid for with the customer’s information – the swipe of a loyalty card (or your mere presence) will confirm that. There will be a major role for an organisation like Amazon, Facebook or Tesco in these transactions – or equally likely, a new entrant. It could also involve Apple – but only after Steve Jobs leaves. Some of these companies may even buy publishers as a way to get more customer data.

Meanwhile, publishers will continue to push prices in the other direction – converting the newspaper from tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping to a luxury product, where you are buying access to an exclusive club as much as the content itself.

Prediction 3: Journalism will be more like a musician’s career than a job-for-life

The casualisation of employment generally is a trend that pre-dates the internet, and there’s nothing to suggest that will not continue – especially as it can be facilitated by internet technologies.

The idea that once upon a time people did not publish any journalism until they were hired by a news organisation will seem incredible by 2036. By then, the industry may well resemble the music industry of a decade ago, where you were expected to build a fan-base through regular gigging.

So here’s a fantastical picture of a newspaper’s recruitment team in 25 years’ time: a veritable A&R department, scouring social media to see if they can pluck the next rising star before their competitors do.

But that won’t be the end of the story: as news becomes increasingly tied to the reputations and networks of those who produce it, an increasing number of journalists will use the move to a major publisher as a stepping stone to their own independent niche news operations.

Prediction 4: There will be no single media industry

Talk about journalism in 2011 suffers from a tendency to classify the profession too narrowly. While traditional publishers scale back operations, new startups are hiring. In magazines we’ve seen incredible growth in customer magazines and in-house publishing, and in broadcast there has been an explosion of channels serving a similar need.

By 2036 all of those operations will have matured considerably – and expanded. The transport industry will employ more journalists – directly or indirectly – than The Liverpool Echo. Possibly.

Either way, many organisations and industries will have long ago moved beyond communicating directly with customers, and have begun using content as a way to attract them in the first place. That is, after all, how some newspapers evolved. We can only hope that the next generation of media offers a place for independent journalism, with competition driving quality up.

Prediction 5: Online journalism will become more specialised – and more predictable

The commercial drive in media in 2011 is towards more and more specialist niches (or bigger and bigger networks of those niches). In addition, the skills required to deal with information are becoming more and more varied. From a time when you either typed articles, recorded audio or edited video we are entering a period where you need to be able to do all three and dozens of other things besides.

This is difficult for journalists because the rules of production are not well established, and media literacy is equally immature. But in 25 years, institutions will have explored many different ways of organising their newsrooms and the journalists within them – and settled on better ways of working. This may involve junior reporters who will be expected to work across multiple platforms – but there will also be more senior journalists who are experts in video, data, or the communities they serve.

At the same time, the tools of production will have become much simpler – and the genre more established. It is only in the second decade of online journalism that we are seeing forms native to the medium: audio slideshows, maps, clickable interactives, databases. Those forms will mature and conventions will develop which by 2036 will seem normal – even formulaic.

Set a reminder for 25/02/36

So as I jump in my hover-car to fly off to my next big story (wearing fluorescent pink, of course), I leave my crystal ball behind. Call me back in 25 years when I look forward to laughing my socks off at just how hilariously wrong I’m going to be.

UPDATE: As if to prove my point in Prediction no.4, here’s Saab buying a blog about Saab cars.

What happens when you bring together local journalists, bloggers, web publishers, online journalism experts and new media startups – and get them talking?

That was the question that JEEcamp sought to answer: an ‘unconference’ around journalism enterprise and entrepreneurship that looked to tackle some of the big questions facing news in 2008: how do you make money from news when information is free? Where is the funding for news startups? How do you generate community? What models work for news online?

Half the attendees represented the people behind the mainstream media’s attempts to get to grips with the web – the hyperlocal sites of the Teesside Gazette; the mapping and crowdsourcing of the Manchester Evening News; the blogs of the Birmingham Post.

The other half represented what is clear is an emerging cottage journalism industry: niche news websites; local blogs; citizen journalism and news prediction services.

Rick Waghorn’s keynote speech on his experiences of establishing and expanding MyFootBallWriter set things going perfectly. In particular his negative experiences of Google AdSense found a very receptive audience: despite 400,000 page impressions over the summer, he said, his AdSense revenues were only $180, while in seven years the most popular Harry Potter website has earned only $6,500 from the scheme. Following proceedings online, Graham Holliday added: “Bang on on Adsense – I do around 50,000 per month and make $100 – $150 off of it.”

The verdict from Rick: “Clearly if anybody is going to earn a living, it cannot be through Google Ads.”

Instead Rick explained his own business model – a combination of old-fashioned local ad sales; a self-built ad service, Addiply; affiliate sales; and syndication to those big publishers looking to add more local coverage to their global brands.

This was an ‘unconference’, so after Rick’s speech the emphasis was on discussion and exchanging experiences. The group discussing community spoke of the problem of users’ “sporadic involvement“; of journalists not connecting with people online; technological barriers to instant publishing; the need for journalists to become brands. There was an anecdote about bloggers recruited by the Birmingham Post ‘scooping’ the paper by scheduling embargoed news to go live the minute the embargo was lifted. (Not that the journalist concerned felt this was a bad thing).

The group discussing business models scratched their heads at the possibility of OhMyNews’ tip jar model working elsewhere and why it didn’t make a profit from ads and syndication; whether big publishers should buy up startups; and the problems of aggregation, Martin Stabe arguing that the only aggregators that had any chance of success were those that added something, such as geotagging.

The funding group talked of the importance of five year financial forecasts; how to tackle web-ignorant banks; why there was a need for a British equivalent of the Knight Foundation; and how angel investors want to see a big existing market because the risks of complete failure are lower.

And the online news models group discussed how journalism is not just about reporting, but networking; the importance of interaction on every level rather than simply forums; and the need to get out alerts, while ensuring accuracy.

The event was covered live by a team of journalism degree students using CoverItLive at JournalismEnterprise.com, which enabled people to contribute to the discussion – and create discussions of their own – online.

In addition there was a JEEcamp aggregator which pulled together blog posts, images, video, bookmarks and tweets following the event, and a Twitter aggregator pulling together tweets from attendees. Video of the event should appear on the European Journalism Centre website. Video of Rick’s speech was live streamed by Mark Comerford.

Reflections on the event worth reading elsewhere include Azeem Ahmad’s report on the day; Alex Gamela’s online highlights; Journalism.co.uk’s reports; Charlie Beckett on community; Pete Ashton on news as a game; and Rick Waghorn’s blog posts written after the event.

The day ended with a panel discussion of some of the emerging issues. As I looked out at the people gathered it occurred to me that in ten years time one half would probably have bought out the other half.

The question is, which half will be which?

Could 2008 be the year geotagging breaks through? Archant are the ones to watch in the UK with (delayed) plans to geotag all their stories. I asked Suffolk’s Web Editor James Goffin to write a piece for the OJB on his experience with the process – and the opportunities it’s opening up. 

Journalists have always asked the question “Where?”. People are interested in news from where they live, and it’s a sad fact that tragedies abroad have more resonance when there’s a British passport holder involved.

As communities have become more mobile, those associations have become more complex – people reminisce about their home town, where they used to work; they are interested in where they live now, where their brothers and sisters have moved to. The world around them has become more complex too, as has the sheer amount of information being pumped out around them.

Search engines are great ways of finding this information, but they can only do so much. Every news editor should have a Google News email alert for the key towns on their patch, but text searching can’t tell the difference between the Yarmouths in Norfolk and the Isle of Wight. For that you need something more.

The answer is geotagging, and it is one of the key improvements in the new editorial and web content management system being developed by Archant.

As with most Web 2.0 ideas, it’s less complex than its name suggests. Geotagging simply means attaching a location that a computer can understand – say a postcode, or a longitude and latitude pair – to an article.

This opens up the possibility of readers creating their own, personalised websites, solely comprised of news about the communities they care about. Simply supply the postcodes you’re interested in, and the technology selects those stories that match.

For instance, we have two daily titles that cover Norfolk and Suffolk respectively, but never the twain shall meet. If you live on the border, you probably want a selection from both, and geotagging makes that easy to achieve across our traditional boundaries.

From a commercial standpoint, an advertiser’s market isn’t defined by our print circulation maps either.

We can display information in new ways. Rather than What’s On listings that take up acres of space, tell us how far you’re prepared to travel and we’ll give you a map of what’s on near you. We’re already experimenting with Christmas lights maps, local shopping directories, and interactive background maps.

Others like the Manchester Evening News, with their murder map, and the Grantham Journal’s heron map, are in the same arena.

There are benefits for the traditional print product too. Geographical editions can be more easily planned; local promotional billing becomes a cinch.

Sales, marketing, and newsdesks can see which areas of the patch are being covered best or neglected most (if you can get the newsdesk to look at a spreadsheet, that is).

Perhaps most powerfully of all, for the ever-consolidating newspaper groups it becomes easier to pick up on relevant stories from outside our patch written by our colleagues on the other side of the country.

There are problems of course. The current Archant editorial system allows stories to be marked by village name – in fact it requires it. But it also has an option of ‘NAS’ – non area specific – which gives reporters the option of typing three letters and forgetting about it rather than working out which parish that house in the middle of the countryside falls in.

Then there are the stories that have multiple locations: people from Norwich on trial in London; Felixstowe to Ipswich car rallies; new council tax rates.

Our solution is to give reporters a map and allow them to click on individual points or draw a rectangle that encompasses an area such as a council’s boundaries, or alternatively supply postcodes.

We are also trying to make it clear how accurate geocoding – and other data like keywords – will make for a better archive and make reporters’ lives easier in handling cuttings and follow ups.

The NUJ have raised concerns that adding postcodes could be intrusive, asking: “How long before Archant reporters will be heard calling out: ‘Anyone here been raped and got an NR postcode?’”.

In reality, I don’t believe that postcodes are any more intrusive than the road names we have routinely included in copy for years and we are conscious of the need for the same level of sensitivity here. We don’t want to be the first people up in court for plotting a sexual assault victim’s address on a map.

Like much of the web revolution, whether it’s crowdsourcing (asking your readers), online comments (readers’ letters) or geotagging, this is all stuff we already do. Location has always been important. It’s just about collecting and segmenting that information in a way that means we can make the most of it.

The fourth post of the Model for the 21st Century Newsroom looks at how distribution is changing from a push/pull model to a tripartite, push-pull-pass, one.

In the 20th century, commercial distribution of news was relatively straightforward: if you worked in print, you published a newspaper or magazine at a particular time, it was transported to outlets, and people picked it up (or it was delivered). If you worked in broadcast, you broadcast it at a particular time, and people watched or listened.

Simple.

In the 21st century, the picture is a little more complicated.

It’s widely recognised that we are all journalists now, and anyone can be a publisher. But less widely publicised is the fact that, at the same time, and for the same reasons, everyone is a paperboy now.

Perhaps that’s because it’s not quite so glamorous.

Nevertheless, it’s a crucial factor in news production to consider. Whereas traditional news publishing and Fordist production processes separated journalism (newsgathering, newswriting, editing), publishing (printing) and distribution (transportation, postage, broadcasting), those areas are blurred in a new media world because we can perform all three functions with the same action. As an online journalist I can gather and write up information, publish it and distribute it, sometimes with a single click.

This creates two problems:

• Firstly, an online journalist is not typically trained in distribution. An understanding – or at least, exploration – of distribution, therefore, is needed – because everything they do as a journalist, online, is actually an act of distribution.
• Secondly, the news organisation typically does not devote the same resources to online distribution as it does to physical distribution – and when it does, it does so in an uneven manner. Organisational distribution (tactical, intentional) should be different to journalistic acts of distribution (incidental).

The distribution model for the 21st century newsroom, then, seeks to explicitly identify the range of distribution networks, before looking at how those affect the other two parts of the production chain: journalism and publishing.

The diagram below illustrates how new media combines the distribution models of print and broadcast – ‘picking up’ and ‘tuning in’ – and adds a third: ‘passing on’. We can cutely abbreviate this to the helpful mnemonic ‘Pull-Push-Pass’. I’m going to deal with examples of each of the three – their strengths and weaknesses – in turn.

Picking up

The printed newspaper is not the only format that can be distributed by people picking it up. An obvious equivalent online is the PDF newspaper, typically executed as nothing more than a download of the newspaper - although some notable examples have tried to do more interesting things with the technology, such as regularly updating them throughout the day, or producing editions for a specific area, such as finance, and incorporating multimedia.

The PDF newspaper appears to combine some advantages of print (portability and embedded ads) with some of those of new media (passing on printing costs to the consumer; the ability to update regularly). But generally it underexploits too many other advantages – and this may be why so few people use them, and so many papers have dropped them. There are better ways to spend your money.

Online, it is not your entire newspaper edition that you are distributing, it is each individual page - from today’s edition, and from every edition in your archive (the long tail). Therefore, every internal link is a piece of distribution, and it should be part of standard practice (or your CMS) to ensure that readers are given links to related stories within your site when they are reading an article (and failing that, outside your site. Don’t worry, they’ll come back).

Likewise, any good distribution strategy relies on being where your readers are (and one of the reasons why traditional newspaper distribution has been failing for some time), so email newsletters, while they now seem old-fashioned, remain a useful part of any distribution strategy – the more specific, the better. Mobile updates should be even more specific, and relevant to the reader – or they’ll unsubscribe.

RSS is similar to email and mobile updates in many ways – and there are services which will convert an RSS feed to email, which has enormous potential for generating ultra-niche personalised email newsletters. But RSS shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for email: it is a different technology with different users and different uses.

The more RSS feeds being offered, the better. At a basic level, there should be RSS feeds for every traditional section of the paper – sport, business news, etc. Drilling down, the reader is likely to want RSS feeds for specific areas, e.g. a particular football team, weather in their postcode. Or particular stories – the latest on Big Brother, or Madeleine McCann.

There should be a feed for every journalist on the paper, and needless to say, every column, blog, podcast and video channel. You might also consider RSS feeds for any search results. And we should be thinking beyond the news – jobs, for instance, and dating, are obvious candidates. Once you’ve published those RSS feeds, others can do interesting things with them – which I deal with below under ‘Passing on’.

Finally, streaming video deserves a mention. It isn’t the best way of distributing content – embeddable video, also dealt with below under ‘Passing on’, is much better if you are selling advertising on the video itself – and probably even if you are selling advertising around it (how many times have you clicked through to YouTube from an embedded video on another site?). Bandwidth is less of a reason to stream, while copyright is not a problem with the Flash-based technology that generally constitutes embedded video. So why do we stream? If it’s too big to download, it’s probably too long to watch comfortably online. So split it up. Unless it’s live, make it downloadable, or embeddable.

Tuning in

New media adds relatively few new ways to ‘tune in’, but there is one obvious one – the homepage – and another less so: the live chat.

The homepage as we knew it is dying, but it still serves a purpose: an at-a-glance overview of content. A place for grazing. Most readers are search-driven and will enter your site through a link to a specific page, but a significant minority will search for the newspaper itself, or click on a link, or a bookmark, to the homepage. When they do, they are ‘tuning in’ to your headlines, your featured stories.

But they could be tuning into a whole range of things. It might be dynamically constructed rather than edited six times a day. It could be personalised like the Amazon ‘Page You Made’, or the Facebook widget. It could be aggregated from a gazillion feeds (but do we really need to do that when RSS readers already do it so much better?). Or do we keep it as a statement of what the editors think are the most compelling pieces of content on that day, for what that’s worth?

Live chats promised much, but haven’t delivered, perhaps because they don’t tap into the asynchronous nature of the web, because they ask too much of readers to ‘be there, now’, because the technology or the audience wasn’t fast or big enough. But perhaps the likes of Second Life will resurrect it. It’s one thing to pose questions to your idols on a text interface – meeting them in virtual person appears to be more attractive.

Passing on

While ‘picking up’ and ‘tuning in’ have been central to the early development of news distribution on the web, ‘passing on’ has become central to its development in the web 2.0, social platform stage. And passing on has the potential to become the primary distribution method of the coming decades.

Of course, people always passed on newspapers, or told friends about a story they just heard on the radio, but digital replicability and networked technologies make the process easier, quicker and – crucially – more measurable for advertisers.

Imagine if every newspaper article had a perforated border and a freepost envelope so you could post it to anyone you wanted. Now keep imagining – you’re going to need lots of ideas…

Social distribution strategies

Some strategies to tackle social distribution are technical: using embeddable video rather than streaming or Flash, for instance, enables people to put your content on their website, blog, or Facebook page.

Setting up your website to ‘ping’ any pages it links to (linkback) means they will be aware of your existence, and may comment on what you’ve said, driving more content back to your site (be prepared: not all comments will be positive).

Creating widgets that people can include on their blogs or social network pages that publish your content or that say something about their identity as a member of your reader community provides a further opportunity for reaching new audiences, or expanding your brand.

Including a ‘Digg this’ or ‘BlogThis‘ button, or an ‘Email to a friend’ field helps automate and facilitate social distribution via blogs, social bookmarking services, and email (there are a number of off-the-shelf solutions for this, such as MediaFed’s widget, or WordPress plugins such as ShareThis and Gregarious).

Other strategies are cultural: the new distribution landscape needs journalists to engage in communities outside the newspaper by commenting on blogs and forums – not only generating return traffic, but also goodwill and trust.

Making sure your pages are ‘Dugg’ in-house, as Trinity Mirror did, or ‘seeding’ content with influential bloggers ahead of publication, as the Economist did, also demonstrates engagement.

One way to encourage these cultural changes is to recognise the distribution work financially: Gawker Media, for instance, are introducing a bonus system based on how many visits a piece gets. This is not a particularly accurate measure of ‘distribution’, nor of effort made to distribute something (it conflates it with journalistic effort, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing), but it’s an interesting attempt.

Another cultural change would be to share page view and sharing data with staff.

Some strategies are both cultural and technical: linking externally, for example, will be dependent on the organisation’s content management system (CMS) as well as the journalist themselves. Even without linkback, this will make site owners aware of incoming traffic and your own site.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) relies on training journalists and editors in the art of the search engine-friendly headline, but also on systems that generate meaningful URLs, heading tags and metatags, linkbacks, and ‘clean’ code. All will contribute to a healthy ranking on search engines – but remember it’s inbound links (translation: being part of the conversation) that really make the difference.

Crowdsourcing and citizen journalism initiatives require both technological and editorial support, but again have massive potential to generate goodwill and engagement with the publisher.

Likewise, mashups require a culture of openness and collaboration with people outside the organisation, as well as technical availability and openness of RSS, APIs, etc. But the potential benefits in terms of new services, applications, and readers, are enormous.

Implications for journalism and publishing

At this point it’s worth highlighting that in social distribution the journalism itself becomes ever more important, and the newspaper or channel less. I’ll repeat: it is not your entire newspaper edition that you are distributing, it is each individual page, i.e. the story.

In a glass-half-empty world, this could mean more panda videos, but a canny broadcaster or publisher will soon realise that, on that front, they cannot compete with YouTube.

In a glass-half-full world, however, it could mean investigative journalism, crowdsourcing, engagement, transparency. Plus niche publishing, community and utility.

In a nutshell, we are moving from a need for ‘news that sells’ to ‘news that moves’: useful news, distinctive news, specific news, news that we’re involved in.

For that reason, the potential of games for storytelling, for multimedia interactives, and for customisation and personalisation, becomes commercially important.

If there’s a story on the election in every paper, what can you do to bring in visitors? If every paper carries a match report, what makes yours distinctive? In a world of infinite information, where’s your ‘wow’ factor to get people talking?

There are further important implications for commercial publishers. Whereas an ad in a newspaper is viewed by whoever picks it up – whether they paid or not – online, content can, and will, be separated from advertising. Some of that content will have to be treated as part of marketing. Other parts will have to look at ways to incorporate advertising – as has happened with RSS feeds. And for others, it may not be advertising at all that makes the money. For this reason business models will need to change – something I deal with in the final part of this model.

As always, this is a work in progress. Please add your comments, analysis, examples, corrections and caveats and I’ll try to address them.

[Keyword: journalism, online journalism]. I’ve only just caught up with Shane Richmond’s post on the future (or proposed death) of newspapers, following a seminar which suggested in the year 2012 “a typical media group will have a stable of publications: a daily premium news magazine, a free daily paper, a portfolio of websites, an internet television channel and a hyperlocal publishing network.”

Richmond disagrees with the magazine element because “people are less and less inclined to pay for bundles of content” and the RSS-fuelled Daily Me (Frighteningly, Negroponte’s idea is over a decade old) is a “model of media consumption that leads me to believe that media delivery to portable devices (phones, PDAs, electronic readers, flexible displays etc) will, at some stage in the future, supersede ink-on-paper media. I think so, others in the room disagreed.”

I’m of the mind to agree that portable devices and the My Google-style personalised news page will come to dominate news consumption, but that paper will continue to have an important role for the reason that RSS still requires you to select what interests you, whereas paper presents a browsing experience different to the ‘search-and-scan’ approach online. Research shows people are very task-oriented when they go online; a paper is an opportunity to come across stories you wouldn’t otherwise find; and in a local paper context, get an overall picture of what’s happening.

Now, two things may change this: first, social recommendation. When those whose judgement we trust begin to drive our news consumption in a mainstream way, the editor’s role becomes, if not redundant, at least transplanted. Second: screen resolution. When reading a story online or on a portable device becomes as comfortable as reading paper, we may drop the search-and-scan approach.

As for magazines, as I’ve written elsewhere, I think one future for them is as facilitators of virtual communities – a forward thinking magazine publisher will be investing in social recommendation software, forums, reader-editors and expert bloggers right now…

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Paul Bradshaw lectures on the Journalism degree at UCE Birmingham media department. He writes a number of blogs including the Online Journalism Blog, Interactive PR and Web and New Media