The Modern Journalist

What the Web Does: A Breakdown

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Jeff Jarvis has written a post about news organizations moving away from thinking of themselves as destinations (or I might say the gatekeepers of information) and towards a more “distributed strategy for news,” which he lays out as this:

1. Widgets that enable people to embed your news (and links and brand) anywhere.
2. A platform strategy enabling people to build on your content, data, and functionality.
3. A network strategy that includes blog networks (a la Glam).

It’s the beginning of a great point, one that I haven’t included at all in my Newspaper 2.0 section — but one that somehow has come out in the book proposal.

He’s exactly right conceptually although there is so much more to this distributed nature. For instance, I’m not sure that worrying about the blogosphere jibes with creating a platform — since blogs are the result of a platform. Why limit the discussion to blogs. Where, for instance, do the 3D persistent worlds fit in? Or mobile devices? Or Twitter and other mobile networks?

But I’m nitpicking because his thought — his theory — is exactly what we should all be thinking about in some manner. Let me explain.

Earlier today, I was speaking with the folks at The Seybold Report, a technology and publishing market research firm that asked me to contribute a few articles based on the book, blog and social network. We were discussing two areas of publishing: publishing platforms to repurpose content (re: content management systems) and social media technologies that will change how we do business.

My main focus — which my writing partner John Borland so aptly pointed out to me — is that each medium comes with its own inherent benefits: radio (voice), television (pictures), print (words) and the Web (data).

The first three are pretty easy to see, although we can haggle over the idea that radio can now have data (thank you digital), television has voice and print and print has pictures.

But if you can buy the basic premise that each medium offers a unique message, then you can buy my next argument.

Surely you can stream or download voice, pictures and words to the Web, but the true benefit of the Web — the one thing the other mediums can’t do — is crunch loads of data and connect people directly together. If you buy that premise, then Jarvis’ argument (and hopefully my thesis) make so much more sense.

News organizations should look at the Web not as a supplement or an addition to their print products (or voice or pictures), but an expansion of their product. A place to do what they have not been able to do before.

And the more I thought about that idea, the more I realized that is what we’d done at Technology Review. We’d always looked at the print product as a premium product. The thing you held in your hand. The Web was our up-to-the-second, connect with the masses platform for communication.

The Web, in other words, was the place to aggregate — both in to us and out to the world — content. Whether using AIR desktop applications, RSS feeds for aggregating content (something I never did well at TR), opening up our developer kits (APIs), building and aggregating unique database information and allowing our readers to both interact with our content while actively recruiting theirs, these are what a modern web-based organization should be doing.

It’s starting to clear up a bit in my mind, but I hope that Jarvis — and the rest of you reading — will help me take this idea of distributed news delivery to the next logical step. I think the conversation is starting to get us there.