Finding the signal in the flow

Suw and I had been noticing a bit of an economic uptick on our local high street here in London last autumn and into the winter. Shop fronts that had been empty were getting new tenants, and just in our corner of the Big Smoke, we could see green shoots of recovery.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/JonathanLloyd/statuses/40012699773575168″]

This morning Jonathan Lloyd who has a hyper-local content and commerce platform, Media Street Apps (story about the platform here on journalism.co.uk), tweeted this observation that he was seeing gutted shop units. It’s not the first rather grim economic observation that I’ve seen on Twitter as the UK economy seems to be softening again.

As a journalist, I immediately started to think of how we might find the signal in this flow of updates. Jonathan is very close to local retailers, and he might be flagging up an indicator of the direction of the economy. Google is already mining its own online shopping data to map local inflation trends in the US to create its own price index, and while I was writing this, Techmeme editor Mahendra Palsule says that financial market analysts are already doing this and flagged up the Stocktwits service.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/ScepticGeek/statuses/40017866702983168″]

I wonder what other signals we could find in the flow of social media and how this might be used for journalism.

New news business models can’t ignore new economics

Normally, I would just add this to our (almost) daily collection of links, but Vin Crosbie has said something so succinctly and clearly that it deserves a post and a full reading. At ClickZ, Vin says:

…today with newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters who clamor for the “missing” business model that will allow them to stay in business doing what they’ve always done. It will never be found because continuing to do what they’ve done no longer makes sense. There are more quick and efficient ways to produce and disseminate information.

Anyone looking for the silver bullet business model to save their old business needs to read what Vin has to say.

The internet has fundamentally changed the economics of information. Digital distribution has ended information scarcity, and much of the new talk of paywalls isn’t about making money but attempting to recreate scarcity. I seriously doubt this will work, and I seriously doubt that trying to squeeze revenue out of much of the existing information output will work. There is no business model that will allow journalists to simply continue doing what they have done. Journalists, editors and publishers need to accept this and re-make their businesses.

Chris Anderson of Wired points out that the journalism businesses of the 20th Century was built on scarcity and monopoly rents. Newspapers were once the most efficient ways for advertisers to get their messages to the public. This created media empires that could fund huge staffs of journalists. Howeveer, beginning in the 1970s and accelerating with satellite television and the internet, people had more choices for entertainment and information. As I’ve often said, information isn’t the scarce resource now. We’re fighting for attention.

This leads to a host of questions. These are just a few.

  • Accepting that information is no longer scarce, what value can journalists add for our audiences?
  • If we’re not adding value, why are we doing it? What are we going to have to stop doing?
  • What new services can we create that will support journalism?

We really need to be thinking beyond business models to support our existing business and our existing ways of doing journalism. I used to think that the efficiencies of digital production would help existing journalism organisations to jump the chasm. I’m no longer confident that this is possible.

After a very busy summer, I’ve got a backlog of blogging here on Strange Attractor and a backlog of thoughts. In addition to considering the issues of over-supply, I agree with Dan Gillmor, we’ve got a problem with the demand for news. As per usual, Dan is asking some very important questions. I am starting to think of ways that we can stimulate demand by actively working to engage our audiences. I’m excited to be plugging back into the discussion about what we journalists do next, and Suw and I are looking to move this discussion beyond the talking and into doing.