(2019-04-07) The Future Of News Is Conversation In Small Groups With Trusted Voices

Chikai Ohazama: The future of news is conversation in small groups with trusted voices. I feel like my news consumption these days is like those sushi boats. I sit down and the news just streams by and I pick out the articles I like and read them. Very efficient and also a little bit of fun. But I’ve been stuck at the sushi boat bar of news for far too long, watching the same imitation crab rolls go by. I need a better way to consume better information.

As you probably guessed, that “sushi boat bar of news” is Facebook, Twitter and the like. The algorithmic nature of news feeds tends to target the lowest common denominator.

Wired has proclaimed that “It’s time for an RSS revival”.

If email newsletters or RSS were to become the replacement, it would need a new approach or framework, not just a rehashing of past products. But that is only half the problem. In this day and age, we have become accustomed to having our friends and other people around when we read the news. (Social Object)

Now people are starting to get more and more of their information via messaging, which is looking to be the next step in the progression. You can already see this transition happening in places like India with WhatsApp, where it is becoming a major source of misinformation.

I’m pretty confident that closing the circle to a closer, trusted group would be welcome by most people. Social Warrens, Assemble-ItYourself Component-Based Journalism

Mike Isaac: ...why i started this newsletter. the form is a kind of weird semi-private hybrid — a public newsletter, sent directly to inboxes, which occasionally elicits one-to-one conversations with some of you.

Even Fred Wilson noted that his readers often email him directly with blog comments that lead to one-to-one conversations. I wonder if Fred enjoys it as much as Mike does.

I’m sure this doesn’t scale very well, but it provides an interesting starting point that aligns with where we are heading.

There are many people who are often the subject of the articles written in The New York Times that should have a voice of their own (Sources Go Direct). “The Players’ Tribune” is a media company built entirely around that concept, giving athletes a platform to connect with the world on their own terms. The critics are skeptical that this just sugar-coats their stories, but you can’t ignore testimonials like the father trying to get his son to enjoy reading and how Steph Curry’s story connected with his son like no other sports publication could.

So I believe it will have to be a diverse group of voices that will guide us, just like reading only one publication these days may not always give you the whole story. It will likely start with one-to-one conversations between those voices and their readers, but that will only be the beginning.

For publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post, it’s an opportunity to re-establish themselves after the wake of the internet revolution.

If you use Eugene Wei’s framework (2019-02-19-WeiStatusAsAService), social capital has grown to be enormous, but that by itself is not the concern — it is because social capital has become a fungible asset that can be bought, sold and used in whatever manner you choose. It was all fine when it was just YouTube and Instagram influencers peddling products and making money, but when you can use that same social capital to influence elections, it started to make people feel very creepy and unsafe.

This transformation is an opportunity to reinvent the business model. It still may fundamentally be about lending out people’s attention, but it may become much more tangible. If you go back to print media, when you purchased an ad in a magazine, you had to use the size of the readership as a proxy to gauge how much attention that was lent to you. If what you get instead is a conversation with a potential customer, it is much more valuable. A good indicator that this could be a good business model are companies like Intercom, which are creating tools to immediately engage in conversations with customers instead of just taking them to a landing page.