The disaggregation of news

Traditionally news were always presented in neatly edited packaged. No more. In web 2.0 the individual news story frequently becomes more important than the edited package. What does this mean for news providers?

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Newspapers, radio and television have a set of common limitations of how news are presented to the public:

• All are mainly one-way channels: Editors choose which stories are important and broadcast them to the public. Responses from users are rarely presented in real time.
• Being linear media news are usually presented in edited packages. In fact, the very idea behind a newspaper is to represent a picture of the world within the limits of physical restraints (number of pages). The same goes for radio and television: Editors carefully choose a package of stories to fit within the preset time limit.

Journalists are trained within the same tradition: You look at the world, choose which stories are important and present them in a package within predefined physical limits.  Good journalism is not only defined as doing an individual story well, but also presenting it smartly as part of a larger content package. This includes telling which stories are important and which are not so significant.

The main product of a media company in this tradition is an edited package of articles/stories, not the individual story itself.

In fact, newspapers, radio and TV had no choice. Physical limitatations of the channels forced editors to present the news as packages rather than individual stories.

The web has turned this principle upside down – and news are no longer only presented as part of edited packages. Instead we see a process of disaggregation of news. Rather than just being a part of a larger package, individual news stories now have their own life. An increasing number of visitors to news sites land on specific news articles rather than going through the well-edited front page of the service. It is not uncommon for news web sites to experience that more than one third of the visitors don’t even look at the front page during their visit.

The disaggregation of news has a major impact on the news industry, and the consequences of this development are still far from being recognized by editors and journalists.

A parallell development is what has happened with the music industry. Only a few years ago individual tunes would always be sold as part as a record – or an edited package of music tunes from an artist. With iTunes the music offering has been disaggregated: Now you can buy the individual tunes, not only the pre-edited package of a CD.  The disaggregration of music is a consequence of the digitalization of music – and has had an dramatic effect on the music record industry.

So how are news disaggregated in web 2.0?

• Search has become a major traffic generator for news sites. An increasing number of visitors enter a news site from a search engine, primarily Google.
• News from different sources are aggregated through a number of services. Through services like Google Reader, Netvibes and Bloglines users are able to aggregate news from topics they are particularly interested in. There are also numerous automatic news aggregation services, such as Google News.
• A number of sites have developed in which the value proposition is to pick relevant news stories from different sources and repackage them into a new product. Huffington Post is one well-known example.
• Many users increasingly depend on theirs peers to select the news fom them. This trend is apparent in Facebook, and even more so on Twitter. Again it is the individual story, and not the edited package of stories, which are being shared.
• In short: People now have a number of different ways to consume news, as I have blogged about before.

Am I saying there is no longer a market for edited packages of news? Of course not. Professional journalists will always have an important function in sifting through huge amount of information and make it easily accessible to the public. But editors no longer have a monopoly as gatekeepers – and must also get used to the fact that users have numerous other ways, many of them quite sophisticated, to sort through and package the news of their interest. You got competitors, journalists!

One interesting question is what the disaggregation of news will do to the news brands in the long run. Will edited packages of news still be their main product? Or will we rather see the news brands primarily as content providers and not as much as the gateway or news portal?

My guess is that disaggregation will continue and more users will choose to package the news themselves according to their specific interests. Users will expect that all different sources are available to them at the same place. This will force many news providers to redefine their strategy and define themselves more as a news provider than a news gateway. Rather than trying to be a portal they will put emphasis on presenting their content wherever users want to consume it.  They have plenty of RSS feeds, make it extremely easy to share stories, add lots of metadata, provide smart widgets, link to content from other sources, etc.

I think we will also see news sites put much more effort into presenting content in relevant context, but with the article template rather than the front page as the starting point. Most users will eventually land on individual news articles and news sites need to make sure that these pages lead smartly to relevant additional content.

What do you think? I would love to hear your thoughts.

In other blogs:

• Teens & News: It’s a disaggregated world

Tagged as: digital future, journalism, media, news, newspapers, social media, web