Recently a thought crossed my mind. A thought about content. One of those big ideas people write books about. This one is about the content on the Internet.
So I will start by presenting the history of content and news. Not that I’ve seen them first hand, but think about the days before television. You got your “content” (entertainment, news, music, whatever) by listening to the radio and by reading newspapers. Other than that, there was buying LP records.
There were and still are people whose sole job was to go places to report news. So a newspaper or a radio station would hire these reporters to get news that otherwise they simply could not get.
Television wasn’t much different. It certainly added another dimension, namely a moving picture. That did not do much to change the format until the 1990s (as I recall) when camcorders gained popularity and ordinary folks would send in their UFO sightings or hurricane footage. Even then, let’s face it, the format is about the same – but it was a beginning of a sort.
Back to the present, the year is 2009. We have the Internet. I have a blog on a .org address on the internet where I post what I think, what I make and what I want to show. There is not much in that respect that differentiates me from online news agencies other than the type of content. As in, this is mostly opinions, theirs is mostly reporting.
So think of it this way, we all have our own column, our own galleries and if we wanted to our own channel or radio station.
It’s really that simple. It costs practically nothing – and often costs nothing at all. It’s available and in the year 2009 it’s also familiar.
This is not news to anyone, and neither is the statement that content is adopting a more free for all approach and not the traditional approach, in which there is a creator and viewers, and they are not separate in any way. There is no stage in our new world anymore.
And so with this shift to peer-created content, our old approach to journalism will inevitably change. And it is already now as we see already.
Let’s consider the very popular slashdot. Their content is and has always been for as far as I recall something along a very simple format. It contains a quote of a short synopsis if you will, which contain then contains a link or two to the actual content. Under that, a short opinion or question or something for debate added by I’m assuming the slashdot posters.
Slashdot posters don’t need to go anywhere to get their content because the content is already there.. The content is provided already, all I need to do is repackage it, put it on a site, citing the source and linking back and there I have it. A news site with no journalists. Just aggregated content.
The journalists become bloggers, photographers, or anyone with content online. They’re just linking to it and adding their own little bits here and there.
Not everybody’s happy, but this is just where the Internet has been going and still is. For now. It is unstoppable once it became available. Get ready to change your understanding of “news” very soon.
Why are we so willing to feed the internet content machine? I have that coming up in a post some time in the future.