News in the Digital Era

Right now, most news organizations are trying to stay relevant without actually changing their structure, which is a terrible decision on everyone’s part. The industry is built around the idea that every news organization has limited reach - local, regional and national organizations, with more relevant but lower quality material at the bottom, and high quality but general material at the top.

That isn’t going to fly, though, in a world where every news organization competes with the other for attention. Local news sites are worthless at everything except what’s happening in a 50 mile radius. Regional sites are utterly pointless. National sites can fare the best, especially at world news stuff, but there’s a lot of competition, and eventually every genre will have trouble against specialized blogs that do nothing but one thing and do it very well (think Ars Technica).

Right now if you know where to look, you’ll get brilliantly written articles about whatever you want to learn about, and then you can just tie them together in your favorite RSS reader - or bookmark them if you prefer things simpler than that. For people who care about news, the answer isn’t the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none approach of current news organizations.

Probably the reason there’s so much resistance to this is that you simply can’t run a print news shop that way simply because of the scale required and the capital investments. But maybe if they could all learn to share (or, more realistically, spin off the printing and distribution operations) then they can work around that.