The Atlantic Monthly has a piece by Michael Hirschorn on the future of newspapers that may offer a path to how new kinds of virtual communities are forming.
The article opens with a reference to a film that prophesies the future of newspaper publishing called Epic 2015. Epic 2015 begins with a nice short history of web 2.0. At 2005 the film moves into speculation about how news and information will be managed and read. In 2008 Google and Amazon join forces to form Googlezon linking Google's database with Amazon's recommendation engine. In 2014 Epic is formed:
Six years later, Googlezon has launched the ultimate killer app: EPIC, or “Evolving Personalized Information Construct,” a “system by which our sprawling, chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered, and delivered.” Under EPIC, anyone can create news, the users subscribe to independent editors based on their interests, and everyone is paid from the billions in advertising Googlezon sells across this vast mediaverse. The film ends with an Orwellian prediction—“EPIC is what we wanted, it is what we chose, and its commercial success preempted any discussions of media and democracy or journalistic ethics”—and a joke: Today in 2014, The New York Times has gone offline, in feeble protest to Googlezon’s hegemony. The Times has become a print-only newsletter for the elite and the elderly.
Hirschorn goes on to speculate how newspapers take advantage of the disruptions that are currently threatening their business models:
And while it’s true that fewer and fewer people are purchasing newspapers, it’s also almost certainly true that more and more people are reading news…. For all the many things blogs do, their most disruptive application has been to provide an alternate portal into news, bypassing, or “disintermediating,” the sorting traditionally done by newspaper editors and TV news producers…..With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers….Not only do you allow your reporters to blog; you make them the hubs of their own social networks, the maestros of their own wikis, the masters of their own many-to-many realms. To take but one example, Kelefa Sanneh is the pop-music critic for TheNew York Times. He is very likely the best music critic in the country, and certainly the best new Times music writer in years. Let’s say that Sanneh creates his own community around the music he likes.
I believe the scenario outlined here is how new communities (or what I like to call learning networks) are forming on the second generation web: People with deep subject matter expertise establish themselves as hubs for communities of interest and practice. Like minded writers publish commentary and original writing inspired by the “professionals.” These writers are in turn read by others. I write about this in Web 2.0 for Business Advantage:
Web 2.0. RSS has become the language of syndication of content between all the systems on the web. I can subscribe to content produced by other publishers. I can combine the subscription services of RSS with search and filtering to make sure I get just the right content from just the right publishers. I then integrate new content into my own understanding and turn around and publish it. My view is then picked up by others. This process of syndication is very much like what happens in communities where people pass ideas on to one another, transform these ideas and then
pass them on again. RSS is the means by which this new kind of “conversation” happens.
And the best example I know of this new kind of community is formed around The Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee writes about knitting. She is surrounded by a network of knitters who read her blog and comment on it. Many of these knitters keep their own blogs and reference and cross reference each other. Stephanie is a published author and popular public speaker and often the community of interest that has formed around her has the chance to move into the physical space and meet her and another at yarn shops across the country where she shows up for talks.
This new kind of community formation can be compared to how networks form and grow. Hubs emerge and are reinforced with more and more connections.
Hirschorn concludes with a vision of how the publisher syndicates and re-aggregates all of this new content into a new kind of network:
What if you essentially exploded the central function of the newspaper and “microchunked” (to borrow a current term) the content, syndicating all of it to bloggers or other news sites in return for a share of any advertising revenue each site generates? The Associated Press has made this the centerpiece of its digital-age strategy: it recently signed a potentially breakthrough deal with Google, in which Google will pay the AP for access to its stories; and the AP has launched a broadband player that Web sites can use to access AP video content. Its content goes where the readers are, and the AP gets paid, no matter what. Remarkably, this most old-school of services is a lone bright spot in the MSM landscape. The AP’s revenues have increased from more than $593 million in 2003 to more than $654 million in 2005; its digital revenue grew at a rate of 66 percent from 2004 to 2006. Of course, the AP has always been a syndicator, so no conceptual leap of faith (indeed no leap whatsoever) was required to move the business from analog to digital.
I think there is much to be explored in this new model as a means of activating new communities and creating value for and from them.
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