Chris Anderson is interviewed in this week’s Press Gazette. Lots of interesting ideas, and not all about the Long Tail. I picked out the following remarks as key:
On the internet, stories increase in value over time, rather than disappearing, the way they do in printed newspapers and magazines:
In a weird way, [the internet] completely inverts the calculus of news, which is that the new stuff is what matters and the old stuff doesn’t matter — because the good old stuff gets more relevant over time as more people flag it and link to it.
I guess this is the Long Tail of news, except it’s an interesting shape. Online, news lasts forever. You could say that the most influential articles online are the short head, and the rest of what gets written is part of the tail. Time — when the piece was written — is only a small part of the equation.
The home page is dead:
The day that you could, as a media organisation, expect people to come to your home page, to navigate to news within your site, make you a part of their daily routine — that day is going.
Increasingly people are going to be getting their news from a broad menu of many sites. You can’t expect them to come necessarily to your home page. They will be coming, instead, to individual stories that they find out about in any number of ways — possibly from a blog, possibly from another site, or from Google.
People aren’t visiting websites any more. They’re dipping into stories, flipping back, skimming through. Internet ‘surfing’ is alive and well, as much as the advertisers and advertising managers on mainstream sites might wish it were otherwise.
Your blog won’t make as much money as a successful print publication:
No single blog that we start is going to generate significant revenues in terms of advertising.
QFT.
Why people read blogs as an alternative to mainstream media:
Mainstream interests are often served well by mainstream media, but niche interests are usually not served at all by mainstream media. And that’s a case where the blogosphere is basically filling that gap, and that’s why I prefer it for those subjects.
A lot of the time mainstream media also makes a pretty hamfisted job of covering niche interests. Online, you can find experts on anything. Most journalists are generalists, on the other hand.
Is blogging journalism, and should anyone care:
Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter what journalists think — this is happening anyway.
Blogs have an extraordinarily wide spectrum of styles and technique and it’s not like our world, and yet it’s competing with our world for readership.
The whole citizen vs. professional journalism thing is a red herring, as I see it. If people write interesting, useful stuff then they have got my vote. I don’t care if they are NCTJ accredited. For useful information, I don’t even care if it’s well-written. (Watch a short documentary about citizen journalism here).
How journalistic style might change as a result:
I think the AP style, which has become New York Times style, has dominated the culture of journalism in the US as one of objectivity or being dispassionate, is going to evolve simply because they’re [in] competition from very passionate voices.
An interesting idea. But not always true. A lot of bloggers model their style on what they’re used to in newspapers. Be nice to see a bit more excitement in the papers, though…
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