Syndicate the conversation
There’s always been new media. McLuhan traced the rise and fall of the Roman Empire to shifts in adoption, usage and availability of papyrus. Gutenberg, to paraphrase David Cameron, was the future once. So simply hailing or blaming new media for your particular organization’s respective good or bad fortunes is a little lazy.
I mention this in relation to the ever continuing debate over the death of news journalism and the role of bloggers in the media. I’m not particularly interested right now in what future news rooms will look like, whether they’ll be staffed by editors, journalists, bloggers or algorithms. What I am interested in is what makes this blog infused new media “new”. It seems to me it’s the conversation. Yes I’ve said this before in relation to broadcasting, but lets look at it again in the context of the written word.
Greenslade mentions this today.
I say this as a preliminary to explaining why journalists, especially print veterans like me, are so suspicious of bloggers. We have spent our lives dominating conversations. No, that’s wrong of course. We did not converse at all. We lectured. We provided the information that people feasted on in order to hold their own conversations.
The King James Bible wasn’t meant as a conversation starter, it was a diktat on how to live your life. When the Sun asked the last remaining person in Britain to “turn off the lights if Kinnock and Labour won the ‘92 election it was telling its readers exactly what to do, not inviting them around for a considered debate on the single currency.
Further on, Greenslade really nails the crux of what I’m getting to here.
I think journalists are failing to grasp that truth. Blogging, though democratic in spirit, does threaten the established order of journalism. I was inspired to write this after reading a blog posting by Adam Tinworth (courtesy of a tip from Kristine Lowe. Many thanks). Tinworth writes: “Most media people don’t realise that blogging is a community strategy. They think of it as a publishing process… They certainly don’t think of it as a conversation.”
Yep, it’s the conversation. Never before has it been possible for all range of people to have global conversations they way they are now. That scares much of the news media. It shouldn’t. Because never before has it been possible for the news media to facilitate and host conversations at a global, 24/7 level. We should be enthused and excited by these possibilities.
It’s what Ballmer was getting at when he referred to IP advantages over TV. And if Steve Ballmer at Microsoft gets it then so should any high ranking executive in the news business.
Now for the really exciting bit. These conversations shouldn’t just be left to the tail end of blogs and the depths of Technorati. They should be taking place all around our news media, both written (by pros and amateurs alike) and video. Tools like Discqus, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and for video in particular the Seesmic Wordpress plugin are starting on the edge of the blogosphere and moving in towards big media, but big media shouldn’t wait.
We have to start innovating around the conversation and that innovation should start with syndication.
Let’s wrap a the conversation around the content layer wherever that content is consumed and wherever there is a danger of the conversation breaking out. News organizations aren’t doing this quickly enough.
A practical example of what should be possible here is the Associated Press in the US.
The AP have been in the news over the past fortnight for trying to shut the convesation down, not allow people use their direct quotes as part of their everyday blog conversation. How stupid is this? Imagine the feds busting into your office and taking down the guys by the water cooler because they were quoting verbatim scenes from the Office. Ridiculous.
The AP actually should be embracing the conversation. Jeff Jarvis mentions that one way for the AP to move forward would be for it to stop homogenizing content and list the source news agency. Well how about this. How about it lets anyone take its stories, but as part of the deal you’ve got to take its simultneous conversation feed. And that’s an absolute must all newspapers and websites downstream of the original AP article. In one go this move brings in a huge amount of intellectual capital to the AP content eco-system. The AP ends up providing a centralized discussion engine, a virtual Speakers Corner.
All of a sudden we have an old media giant using its inherent advantages (relationships and distribution channels through all media) to enhance rather than shut down conversation. The challenge for the rest of us to how to do this without these advantages. We have our users and if our content is any good we have the conversation starters. That should be enough to get going.
Posted by: Cian O'Donovan