It's the Internet, stupid

Pardon me for being late. It’s a sign of laziness, or fifth-year-senioritis, or too much drinking, or some mixture of all of the above.

As several folks have already mentioned, the newspaper is no longer the only place to go for news.

Gee. What a concept.

When the first “newspaper” was born, it wasn’t the only source for news, either. Our forefathers, and mothers, and all the rest of them chatted (using, you know -- their voices. There was no Internet. This was still the olden days, after all.) in bars our at the house, or while they were milking cows or whatever forefathers and all the rest of them did with their spare time. Newspapers weren’t even really full of news, but rather were “organs of political parties that… promote their own causes and… spread scandal about their opponents.” (Downie, page 15)

Sounds a bit like a blog, to me.

Presses started out in the hands of the rich, or the powerful, or friends of either. Over time, though, people learned to read, or write, or both. And the news changed. It could no longer be just opinions based on what a guy, regardless of how important he was or thought he was, actually was. It had to be facts; cold and hard. And by and large, that model has stretched from those times into today.

The Internet came along, and BOOM! That wasn’t going to fly. This past week we had a major example, as the Cartoon Network “Adult Swim” brouhaha spiraled out of control in Boston. On blogs, the two characters that placed the Adult Swim signs all over the city were praised, and the mainstream media was panned. I didn’t read a single blog, in fact, who thought the Boston Police handled the issue in an acceptable manner. My gut tells me bloggers who lean left wanted to attack anything having to do with terror, and those on the right wanted to attack anything in Massachusetts. Be that as it may, posts like this one, http://blog.lolzllc.com/2007/01/bombs-in-boston-actually-ads-for-adult-swim, have flourished. Meanwhile, the mainstream media’s approach has been far different, pandering to the idea that the “attack,” was, well, an attack. Check it out: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/cartoon-network-promo-tied-boston/story.aspx?guid=%7B097E2C5D-F240-4ABF-AB1F-04FA97BFF00F%7D

The news is not the news anymore. It’s not monolithic, and people have the ability to see exactly what they want to see due to the Internet. So our response, in my mind, has to come down to this: #1: What are we supposed to be doing? And, #2: once we realize that’s not going to make money: how do we make money doing something at least tangentially related to question #1?

The answer, in my opinion, lies in the tools the Internet gives us. We can still write out stories about the goings on of government, sporting figures, and the general news of the day (duty #1, in my humble opinion). But at the same time, we can let people find out how that affects them by giving them the tools they need to do that on their own. We can take the information out of the news, a big block of ugly text, and make it usable, so the reader can do with it what she wants.

Check out http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage . On Friday, their new data guru put up a searchable database of pet names in Des Moines. Hard-hitting it’s not. A related story isn’t slated to run until Sunday. In the old media atmosphere, the database wouldn’t go online. And if it did (after a lot of blood, sweat and tears on the reporter/database guru’s part) it would run AFTER – or, at best – alongside the story.

In this case, it ran two days earlier. And as of today, 100,000 unique visitors have logged on to see what that database has to offer.

That’s in a city with a 456, 022 MSA population in 2000. Pretty dang impressive.

In web development circles, it’s called “play.” Letting the user play with the information, and do with it what they will. It’s one thing, after all, to say that “Fluffy is the most important name in the city.” It’s quite another for me to find out that “Sgt. Squiggles the 37^th” is actually the name of a cat across town, in addition to my chia pet.

It’s not related to fluff news, though the idea of ptting it online prior to publication is novel. Check out http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/weather/orl-damagemap020207,0,4189718.htmlstory?coll=orl-home-headlines, a list of places hit hard by Florida tornadoes over the past few days. If I loved in one of those areas, or even nearby, I’d be interested. It’s also not all about programming. Check any of the hundreds of papers that have made video and slideshows part of their daily reader diet.

The shift that has to happen, I think, is that reporters have to realize that their commodity is information, not newspapers. Some of the time, a story is the best way to handle that information. Other times, it’s a database, or a map, or a video. And in another month or two, it will be something that hasn’t even been thunk up yet.

Only when we come to embrace ALL of these tools and see change as part of our commodity will we see how news organizations can do more than survive.

They can thrive.