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Ask HN: What do you think is the future of news?

8 points by JackWebbHeller ↗ HN
From a digital, online perspective, do you think that influences like always-on technology and social media make the internet a better source of news than television?

Has blogging become more influential than broadcast media?

If major broadcasters want to keep up with the real-time, ever-evolving web, how can they do this?

5 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 15.4 ms ] thread
nextparadigms
I think news will become somewhat decentralized. Instead of having one company that does the news publishing, distribution, gathering information, and even "uncovering of truths", we will have different entities that do each of them.

On the "publishing" side, I think we'll have the blogs. One of the great thing about the blogs is that you get to see what the readers think about that story. If the author is biased, some readers will call him out on that.

The "distribution" might happen either from the blogs themselves, or from other services such as news aggregators, Twitter, Facebook, Flipboard, etc.

The "news gathering" part might come in the form of crowdsourcing. Instead of reporters going on site to report on the news from there or gather information, we'll see people taking pictures with their own phones, and reporting themselves what is going on.

As for the "uncovering the truth", Wikileaks seems like a very good indication of what we'll have in the future. But it's not just Wikileaks. Think of the gadget leaks that we have today (although I know some are "controlled leaks").

Some of the leaks might even come through hacking, but I think if the information is useful for the public at large, and it turns out that the Government was withholding that information without a very good reason, such hacks will be praised by most people, even if the Government or the company getting hacked (say the banks?) will try to condemn them.

kloncks
People will disagree with me, but I don't think blogging will ever replace fully-researched journalism.

Twitter and blogs can easily break new news. "Osama Has Been Killed", for example. And that's absolutely important and helpful. But for analysis, I just can't see a blog or 140-characters competing with a full team on The New Yorker or The Economist. The "what does this mean", "how will this affect things", etc will not be answered as well by always-on designed to be fast and instant news sources.

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There are ways for major broadcasters to keep up with real-time. But I don't know of the perfect way. I do, however, believe it's not the CNN-approach of consistently reading tweets on their shows.

JackWebbHeller
Why do you believe it's not the CNN-approach?
kloncks
Television needs to do more, not merely clone (rather badly) a Twitter stream.

There are strengths television has and online doesn't. And vice versa.

JackWebbHeller
I see - I misunderstood your CNN-approach thing, thinking you meant reading tweets about their shows (on Twitter.com or something), whoops. I don't get CNN in the UK (CNNi but that's different) so I'm not too familiar, but I agree that that's not really the best way of 'getting social'...