Media

[danalwyn]

Because squirrelly42 mentioned it, I'm unleashing some thoughts of mine on the nature, and possibly the future, of the news in the information age.



For those days in which my purpose in work is to waste federal tax dollars (consider you're getting me at a bonus rate before you complain), I usually surf through the news.

This is a long and elaborate process for me because a) I read fast, and b) I'm far more obsessive than your average Tom, Dick, and Harry.

So for news, I usually go through the spectrum. A typical path, over the course of a day, looks something like this:

Go through the big news sites:
BBC
CNN
MSNBC
ABC
etc.

Go through the newspapers I know:
New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Guardian
San Diego Union Tribune

Go through some international stuff:
Japan Times or Japan Today
Korea Herald
All Africa
etc.

Read the latest news on developing and continuing conflicts:
IRIN
Global Security
Foreign Policy
The Economist

And then it's on to the specialty news sites to see what's up for the day. I must say though that recently I've been somewhat disappointed.

I have a reasonable respect for Journalism, for which I blame my grandfather, a Journalism Professor for twenty-five years of his life, and the owner of a newspaper for several more years. But it seems to me that, even as the age of the internet brings us unparalleled access to the world, gives us information at the click of a button, and can deliver to our doorsteps reports from Al-Jazeera before they get to the streets of Saudi Arabia, that the quality of news has gone downhill of late.

Despite all those hundreds of articles, what I've found missing lately is good analysis, the sort of thing that should be powering the entire industry, and what we really pay journalists to tell us about. These days we can receive the news from halfway around the world in an instant, in all its gory details. I know, for instance, how many Ethiopian troops have died in the line of duty (by accident thankfully) on the Ethiopia and Eritrean border, and have a rough count on how many units are moving into the area. I know, approximately, what the financial situation of the new semi-autonomous region of southern Sudan is like. I am aware that the Maoists in Nepal have extended the cease-fire. But what I'm missing is the analysis.

How likely are we to see another war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and what are the opening moves we're looking at? I have to extrapolate from a few press releases that are probably less than two hundred words a piece, and that give no details. Someone, somewhere knows the details, and is currently summarizing them up for the State Department or for another set of officials. Why can't someone write articles on that for general consumption? How likely is the Nepalese cease-fire to hold, and how likely are the Maoists to hold to their offer to get involved in the political process? I don't have enough facts to even attempts at making am educated guess, but no news outlet will cover any second-page story in such depth. As the consumer, I am left grasping at straws.

We're now becoming accustomed to being able to access news immediately and on demand, but it seems to raise more questions than it answers. As information becomes increasingly easy to obtain, articles become more compressed, aiming to expectorate the greatest concentration of facts and soundbites onto our computer screen. Analysis has long been the purview of news magazines, but that coverage is splotchy; a few hot spots in a week. The don't cover nearly the volume that would keep us informed in a world that moves as fast as ours does.

It's rare to hear an educated American who doesn't grumble about the sorry state of the news, filled with junk, celebrity interest stories, and thirty-second sound bites. This is a huge market that nobody has yet managed to tap, simply because there has not yet been an organization willing to provide a news coverage that is much more than this. It's possible that the first organization to provide meaningful and in-depth analysis of foreign and local events, on demand, will receive a great many subscribers.

I think the future of the media is going to end up two-tiered, the people who put together the sound bites on one side, who will continue to make things shorter and more terse. On the other end of the spectrum will be those who provide more analysis, more depth, and more content. Their articles will end up being served to users through huge news sites, relayed on demand directly to people's desktops, without the usual costs of paper distribution. The on-demand model has been too successful to ignore and it's probably the future. And there are a lot of people who find themselves interested in a lot of different, very small portions of the world. I'm sure you could drive some kind of market with ex-patriates alone, and it would help people keep in touch, and feel like they knew their part of the world. It's well worth the cost.

Sooner or later somebody will do it. The information exists out there, the experts are available, and the demand is here. It will have to start small, of course, without the flashy graphics or anything else, but it has the potential to grow out of the Blogging industry into something a lot better organized, more formal, and more reliable. And actual knowledge of underlying causes and events will greatly strengthen democracy in many countries, not to mention distributing widely a lot of the information known only to a few today. It seems that a network, no matter how underground it is, of well-developed news sites, will emerge sooner or later to deal with the continual collapse of the major ones. And the sooner it happens, the better.

In the meantime, I'll settle for hearing good guesses about whether Eritrea is going to try and invade Ethiopia.