Following Leeds Digital Festival, our digital and design editor, Leanne Buchan, is sat at home with a large G&T musing on all the information she’s stuffed into her brain and trying to find her own views on how we access, use, create and alter our digital world. Here’s her thoughts on the future of news.
Every time the discussion of news is raised I breathe a deep sigh. At the first ever digital festival we ran a round table that pitched Gordon Young, editor of trade magazine The Drum against Paul Napier, then editor of local paper Yorkshire Evening Post. The discussion focused around how content was delivered, whether that be in short blog posts easy to comment and access in small bitesize morsels, or more in depth feature length articles to be poured over with a cuppa of a weekend. Social media didn’t have the reach it has today and even from as little as five years ago technology has moved on. As I rocked up (late) to the Future of News event, I wondered if our approach had moved on too.
The event brought together bloggers, journalists, news makers, content providers and scholars. The views weighted much more heavily towards social content than they had five years before, with the people in the room agreeing that a new generation will access news from their timelines and twitter feeds. Twitter itself, however,seemed to disagree. Many of my followers were a bit more cynical and felt that advertisers were already there placing content and swaying our media consumption. At the same time figures released estimate that upto 15% of likes and reviews will be fake by 2014.
There was some discussion about the term ‘news’, is it what’s printed in the papers or from a reputable source or is it the stream of updates that keep us abreast of the gossip from Strictly Come Dancing and Xfactor? This I agree with. In order to understand the future of news we need to understand its present and this is evolving even as I type. News tastes aren’t as easy to compartmentalise as they used to be where you either opted for the style pages or the business equivalent.
Faced with a tick box it’s highly unlikely that I’d tick the ‘local news’ options, mainly because it makes me think of galas, knitting clubs and local school fairs. All great but not necessarily my interest. My twitter feed however is swarming with local news. It’s where I go to find out about events, see who’s talking to who, and even spy on the odd spat and scandal if it happens to be unfolding while I’m there. My hypothetical news survey would be full be full of technology, creativity, arts, culture, style, food, drink and anything else that took my fancy at the time.
Some of the best news sources are the ones that understand this relationship between content, personalisation and balancing recommendation in the face of a torrent of spammers. My favourite example of this is the recent revamp of the Good website.
I had a play around with Good which has taken the step towards personalising content. You have to sign in with Facebook or your email address where you’re faced with a tick box exercise. Tick the ones you like and it will display your preferences, you can then follow people who collectively curate your news feed. I don’t know anyone else using Good so the people I choose to follow on there have similar interests to me. People I’ve never seen or heard of in San Francisco are recommending news items I should read, without knowing it. If they recommend rubbish ones I unfollow them, without offending former school friends, and find someone else to curate my news for me instead.
Neither personalised content nor recommendations are new but the two together give digital platforms full of noise a level of curation and navigation where they would otherwise overwhelm. The clever bit about Good is to provide a platform and network that curates news and personalises content without needing your personal connections. This moves ‘social’ beyond ‘tweet this’ or ‘like that’ to a network-curated delivery of news that has nothing to do with reviews and ratings. The articles returned by Good are from people who I have no affiliation with, their review means nothing to me, but they do like the same things that I do. Fake reviews and likes don’t matter here, the curators whose news they are curating.
But print is not being left behind. It still plays a valuable role in curating news without me having to tell it what I like. I just pick out the supplements I want and read them, more often than not I’ll run out of weekend reading ad pick a section I would never have bothered with. Printed news carries a weight that has, on the whole, eluded digital content. The role of an editor, with credentials, who has worked their way through the halls of Fleet Street and rose to the top, knowing how to sniff out a story and craft it with research, factual evidence and well crafted copy writing, is still the stalwart of printed media. This is why it remains current and why it still has a role for the future.
Just as digital media struggles to find an advertising revenue to power its outlets, print too needs to evolve and innovate. I recently discovered The Newspaper Club, an ingenious way to utilise idle newspaper presses across the nation. Create your PDF, upload it and a few days later your specified quantity of newspapers will show up at your door. The ace bit is that they will have been printed locally on a newspaper press that would otherwise have been silent in between printing local titles. You have print media of your own design and specification, they have an income. They’ve printed everything from event guides, community newsletters and training manuals to wedding programmes.
Both print and digital media face challenges as technology advances and our tastes change. Print will continue to exist, digital will continue to exist and maybe we’ll take to sky writing the headlines. But so long as they are personalised, targeted and relevant to me I’ll continue to read them in all their forms.