News organizations spend an extraordinary amount of time and effort deciding what “leads” — what goes on the front page; what goes in the newscast at the top of the hour; what’s important. This is how professional news organizations deploy the minds and time of some of their best-paid and most experienced employees: They sit down at daily meetings and argue this stuff out; sometimes they agonize over it.

In the era of scarce column-inches and broadcast time this made a lot of sense. But that era is fading. With the Web reshuffling how the most avid users of news get their information, editors’ roles are changing — not vanishing, but definitely being challenged.

These thoughts are occasioned by Dave Winer’s new experiments remixing the New York Times. A while back he offered us the Times River — a simple reverse-chronological list of “head-and-deck” links from the newspaper’s RSS feed that is perfect for scanning on mobile devices or just checking in to see what the latest Times stories are. In his latest rethinking of the flow of Times headlines, Winer has built an outline-style interface to the same set of headlines, built around the Times’ own keywords.

These pages are notable for their simplicity. There are no distracting ads, no complex navigational tools, no typographical elegance or design flourishes. It’s just the text and you. A part of me looks at this and thinks, “How crude.” Another part of me looks at it and sees the same spare utility as the original Google home page — and wonders if, a handful of years from now, I’m going to prefer keeping up with my Times this way over continuing to kill trees with my lifelong (but now imperiled) newspaper consumption habit.

Years ago, during the dotcom mania, as Salon’s home page got more and more festooned with stuff that Salon was playing around with to try to increase revenue, a software developer did something similar with our news flow — he “screen-scraped” our headlines and presented them in an ultra-simple list form. (His script still appears to be running but it no longer works properly — Salon’s home page has been redesigned a bunch of times since then.) This was a kind of proto-Salon River. Use of it never spread beyond a tiny handful of geeks. If it had — if hordes of Salon users essentially defected and said they preferred that version of our home page to our own — it would have presented us with a business dilemma.

But I think the real resistance to this new vision for news delivery will be less on the business end (business tends to extract some kind of value anywhere large numbers of people can be congregated) than in the newsroom itself. Because the whole “river of news” approach, like the “newest posts on top” design of all blogs, takes a big bite out of the editor’s job. The reader who looks at Times River and says “this is how I want my news” is a reader who is saying to the Times editors, “Don’t waste all that time figuring out what to tell me you think is important.”

As Winer put it, “They [editors] have a very powerful internal gravity driven by a philosophy that their job is to arrange our thinking.”

I think that there are still plenty of readers who like what editorial judgment adds to the arrangement of the news. Of course, they don’t always agree with it, and many like to argue with it. But they want their quick scans of the news to be ordered by something besides chronology, so they choose a publication to make a deal with, saying, in effect, “I’m giving you my attention and you tell me what you think is important. If I disagree often enough I’ll move on, but in the meantime, tell me what you think matters.”

The real question over the next decade or so will be, how many of those readers are there? Is it the vast majority — which is what most editors believe? Or is it a shrinking tribe of news consumers who grew up under the old dispensation?

Although most professional editors will immediately dismiss the scenario, I think it’s quite possible that the “editors’ cut” of the news will dwindle in importance until we hit some threshold where the majority of users decide they don’t want their thinking “arranged” for them.

At that point, the “river” will roll right across the front page. And some editors may need to find other outlets for their talents.
[tags] future of news, editors, dave winer, river of news, times river, new york times[/tags]

Because I am always behind reading my feeds (aren’t you?) I only just read this post by Doc Searls from a week ago. Coming from a slightly different angle, using his increasingly valuable VRM argument, Doc’s “Toward a New Ecology of Journalism” arrives at a similar place to where I ended up earlier this week in the Times Select discussion:

…The larger trend to watch over time is the inevitable decline in advertising support for journalistic work, and the growing need to find means for replacing that funding — or to face the fact that journalism will become largely an amateur calling, and to make the most of it.

This trend is hard to see. While rivers of advertising money flow away from old media and toward new ones, both the old and the new media crowds continue to assume that advertising money will flow forever. This is a mistake. Advertising remains an extremely inefficient and wasteful way for sellers to find buyers. I’m not saying advertising isn’t effective, by the way; just that massive inefficiency and waste have always been involved, and that this fact constitutes a problem we’ve long been waiting to solve, whether we know it or not.

Google has radically improved the advertising process, first by making advertising accountable (you pay only for click-throughs) and second by shifting advertising waste from ink and air time to pixels and server cycles. Yet even this success does not diminish the fact that advertising itself remains inefficient, wasteful and speculative. Even with advanced targeting and pay-per-click accountability, the ratio of ‘impressions’ to click-throughs still runs at lottery-odds levels.

…The result will be a combination of two things: 1) a new business model for much of journalism; or 2) no business model at all, because much of it will be done gratis, as its creators look for because effects — building reputations and making money because of one’s work, rather than with one’s work. Some bloggers, for example, have already experienced this….

Just don’t expect advertising to fund the new institutions in the way it funded the old.

I think this is right, though the long-term-ness of the vision will have most hard-hearded business people smirking their disbelief as they point to corporate-media revenue numbers with long strings of zeroes dangling from them.

I also think that, frightening as it can look, this is ultimately a great opportunity for journalists. We have the chance to invent new ways to support our work — ways that don’t depend on the essential bait-and-switching of old-fashioned advertising.

We can also give up the contortions and distortions of the old-school “Chinese walls,” the barrier erected between the journalists who create the news reports that have value and the people who sell…other stuff that ends up paying the salaries of the journalists. In any case, I’ve long thought that this beloved wall — for all its ethical value, when it worked — had an insidious side-effect of allowing journalists to pretend that they weren’t working for businesses at all. This innocence (or naivete) has left many of them ill-equipped to do more than rend their garments as their industry undergoes slow-motion collapse.
[tags]vrm, doc searls, advertising, times select, future of journalism[/tags]