News matures into a finer vintage
Monday, November 30th, 2009 by Jon Clements
If Jesus turned water into wine, is it too much to ask for newspapers to turn soda (US: fizzy, sugared drinks) into the same stuff?
The analogy is the work of Umair Haque, director of the Havas Media Lab, and recent guest on a Harvard Business Ideacast. In this, he talks about how the future of the news media hangs on turning what he depicts as their homogeneous product (the “soda”) into something of greater quality (the “wine”). It also, he says, depends on news producers focusing more on people and what matters to them than the product itself.
Maybe this is a uniquely US perspective, as the various news sources that make up UK media - in one way or another - have worked to recognise their audience and generate the material it wants, whether that’s endless X-Factor coverage or sprawling, in-depth features on climate change.
Sure, there have been price wars between newspapers, but that doesn’t stop the Sun, Mail, Guardian and Telegraph knowing what brings back their readers. In the case of the Telegraph, for one, I understand that page views online - an unequivocal measure of reader interest - are now used to influence the content of the printed edition.
The reinvention of news for the web is covered at length by Julio Romo, in his latest post following a recent CIPR Greater London Group meeting which heard from Nic Newman, the BBC’s Future Media and Technology Controller for Journalism and Digital Distribution and Laura Oliver, Editor for Journalism.co.uk.
As Newman is quoted as saying, journalism is undergoing a “quiet revolution” with the advent of social media and user generated content; this, in turn, has meant focusing less on breaking the news than on “verifying and curating” it.
Maybe this is the “wine” referred to by Haque.
Bottoms up!
pic: Jeffrey Barnard, former columnist at The Spectator and actor, Peter O’Toole, pose in The Coach and Horses pub, Soho.
