I love primary shapes when it comes to expressing a thought. They make everything simple - and even complex ideas about the role of traditional journalism vs. blogging can be summed up succinctly.
I was debating what the rise of 'consumer journalism' is doing to the profession - and, in turn, how it impacts the trust we place in comment from different sources - last night. Not the sort of chat you'd normally entertain on a second date, but to my mind this augers well.
Anyway, we were discussing whether bloggers would ever displace professional journalists. If you follow the line of thinking that goes: 'people trust each other more than brands' then it would hold that, with news channels and papers being brands themselves, they would have to make way for the new blood.
But this doesn't feel right. People DO trust their news brands - for differing reasons - but, as the diagram above shows, these brands currently only play in the 'sphere of legitimate controversy.
Understandably there's little merit in playing in the core, but what bloggers are doing - unfettered by the need to toe the party line - is expanding the sphere of legitimacy by exploring the sphere of deviance (stuff the Daily Mail et al would never dare discuss e.g. the merits of immigration) in their droves.
So I don't reckon the old school model of journalism is about to be scuppered, but - thanks to the theory expressed in primary shapes - I reckon they're going to have to adopt the role of 'guide'.
Why? Well, I stumbled across this diagram by linking from Craig the Creative Director's blog to a Guardian article; from that I went to the 'feedback' section and read various comments, and from one of those I linked back to a blog (OK, a Guardian journalist blog) and serendipitously found this article - which was a link within that blog.
French Michel calls it the act of WWILFing - 'What Was I Looking For?' - when you start with one article and are led onto a raft of different topics and thoughts such that you forget what you went online to find out in the first place.
So I WILFed my way far beyond the confines of the Guardian brand - and the stuff I'm talking about now, the stuff that caught my eye was on a complete unknown's blog site.
The Guardian has probably got the most digitally savvy website of any newspaper brand, but even they're only just starting to realise the roles that their profession and their brand will have to play if they're to remain relevant as we opt to explore more and more spheres of deviance...
1 comment:
Me likey. And I find this model very interesting. So I would like to add a comment about an article I read about the NY Times. Apparently they're in such deep trouble that they might drop their print edition, except for Sundays, in May.
But even if they can't afford to print, they're still an incredibly trusted brand. And, according to the article, they are trying to work out how to be such a guide (their problem is the credibility of much other content isn't as good as theirs). My take-out of the article was that what news organisations do survive, will have to do so in a format more like Huffington Post, which itself is morphing the other way--from blog to news source.
For all it's crappiness, CNN is getting interesting these days. Not in quality of content, natch, but in what they are doing digitally. You may have a CNN page on FB for watching Obama take office next week. Check them out.
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