The Future of News Is: Grassroots, Mobile, Immediate, Visual, Participatory, Trusted

Breaking away from many of the more traditional and conservative views still being aired by media blogs and journalism sites on the Web, the latest executive briefing published from The Media Center at the American Press Institute, lays down without fear a marvelous panorama of how the future of news and journalism is going to be radically changed by the multiple converging forces now at play.

These changes are going to deeply transform the universes of news and media access, and while this may be bad news for those who are sleeping on it or discounting this emerging silent revolution, it is indeed super good news for everyone else.

The difficulty is seeing this revolution coming, expecially when you are too connected and dependant on the very media and models that are being taken up from down under.

Photo credit: Dawn Allynn

In four elegantly designed pages of information bursts, the Media Center briefing called Synapse packs together so much vision, wisdom and insight to create a highly inspirational brief of what is about to happen.

The summaries and information passages summarize in such a crystalline way the precise component of this emerging paradigm shift that you need to pause and reflect on each and every word for a moment.

What is being said is that, citizen journalists, small independent news reporters, online guides, street videomakers will disintermediate the control of news and information access in many significant ways.

Here, I have extracted for you a few of these truly enlightening information bursts. In a few short sentences they beautifully paint the view of the future of news being created around us.

 

 

THE FUTURE OF NEWS IS ...

• Bigger, glocal
• Accessible any time, any place, through any device
• Transparent
• Participatory: a conversation, not a lecture
• Edited for more, not less
• Funded through a variety of services and access points
• Reliant on social entrepreneurship
• Authentic
• Trust is the new trust

THE FUTURE OF NEWSPAPERS IS ...

• Smaller in staff, format, influence, attention, profits and margins
• Specific or niche, no longer mass
• Downstream from the Internet
• Inexorably linked to other media
• Explanatory, investigative and narrative

What a view!
These guys do see what I see myself.
I would recommend in fact re-reading the above slowly a few times, while adopting it as a reference for assignment and research in any journalism course worth of its name.

Why is this view so hard to be seen?
Because it is not on the mainstream media that it is talked, analyzed and reported about.

"More tools, more devices, more creators, more content shape a sharing society where everyone competes for influence and attention."

"It's mobile, immediate, visual, interactive, participatory and trusted.

Make way for a generation of storytellers who totally get it."

More of what is going to look like?
Get some of these key vista points:

• A visual Internet, accessible on many devices, in which stories unfold in a video so real that consumers believe they are there.
• Voluntary ads, each relative to a consumer's wishes and desires, delivered at desired times through all forms of communication.
• Personal news networks in which skilled editors, producers and content managers deploy multi-media to inform each other.

The Media Center briefing from which I have extracted the above inspirational sentences is summarizes key findings from media, Technology and Society, as part of a multi-disciplinary research
project on the media landscape conducted for professionals
engaged in strategies, research, thinking, education, policy and
philanthropy related to the future of journalism and media.

The briefing employs an interesting content format in which, next to summary sentences and informative data, key questions are asked in three different ways:

a) Question as it is asked by most people around us

b) What is really being asked

c) What instead we should be asking

as in:

OLD QUESTION: From where will journalism come?

REALLY ASKING: Do we really trust other citizens with journalism?

SHOULD ASK: How will a generation of talented storytellers use multiple forms of media to create and share stories that are relevant to the citizens of an always-on world?

If you want to get a glimpse of the future of media, news, citizen journalism, do head off to read and view some of the great content available at The Media Center.

Highly recommended.

Synapse
BRIEFING ON MEDIA, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY | April 2005
The Media Center
At The American Press Institute
Download here: PDF - 3.76MB

The Media Center is a nonprofit think tank committed to building a better-informed society in a connected world. Find out more about The Media Center.