Mark Dewey: Present trends predict the future

OK, we're finally catching up after spring break and a long hiatus from the blog. Below is my write-up on a Future of News lecture by UT professor Mark Dewey, a former journalist at CNN and a new media expert from his days at AOL.

Also worth mentioning: Dewey's self-described controversial letter that appeared recently in American Journalism Review.

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Mark Dewey sums up the competitive nature of the new media model this way: For traditional media, competitors offer information—all kinds of information, from sports to weather to news to social networking—that is better, faster, and cheaper.

Oh, and in most cases, it’s free.

The problem for traditional media, especially newspapers, is that they haven’t figured out how to navigate this new landscape.
They have failed to recognize what value (or core competency, in business speak) they can (and can’t) bring to the media environment.

“Editors don’t understand their core competency,” Dewey said. “They think it’s picking stories. That is dead wrong. If you want proof of that, look at Matt Drudge. People are more interested in how Matt Drudge picks stories than the editors at fill-in-the-
blank newspaper.”

Rather, journalists’ value-added comes in their local coverage—but because they have missed this, and missed opportunities to provide can’t-find-it-anywhere-else coverage to drive traffic, “digitalization has left the papers behind,” Dewey said. As evidence, he points to the top 100 sites on Alexa; only one newspaper (The New York Times) makes the list.

He sees three key trends emerging in the future of journalism:

1. Digital distribution: “With digitalization comes complexity [think multimedia storytelling]. It’s not just writing, not just inverted pyramid. It takes the realm of communication so far beyond the inverted pyramid.”

2. Specialization (aka disaggregation): “It’s a decoupling of ad revenue from news categories. It’s blowing up our old paper of news, weather, sports, and other categories. It’s a whole different model, and it’s changing the game.” One result of this: It’s not just old media breaking news anymore. It was a niche publication, Wired, that broke the story of wiretapping, thanks to the documents provided by Mark Klein, an AT&T worker with knowledge of NSA’s secret access to Internet traffic. Why Wired? Because the Los Angeles Times turned down an opportunity to investigate and publish it, Dewey said.

3. Too Much Information: There’s more data than we can ever absorb in a lifetime. [See “shift happens” on YouTube.] The result: “News becomes worth less. Not worthless, but worth much less than before.” One problem: We have so many reporters covering the same thing, rather than deploying those resources to cover specialized, localized things. Meanwhile, there are more and more ways for dealing with and aggregating this TMI through widgets such as Digg, reddit, del.icio.us, etc. Dewey also pointed to a couple of interesting sites—Globalincidentmap.com and Daylife—to illustrate the power of visuals to communicate a lot of information in a digestable way. “As artists improve on the Internet, there’s no way the piece of paper can ever communicate all this information.”