Outside of books, I have not read from any physical source in years with the sole exception of my local newspaper. There are certainly many reasons for this, too many to go into here.
The Internet provides me with a wealth of content not available via print (unless I subscribe to hundreds of newspapers). More importantly to me, the Internet also provides a venue for anyone to publish through blogs, etc. Over time I have setup my online subscriptions to various content providers and bloggers so I get a richer experience by reading a diverse set of views on any topic of interest to me.
I admit that much of what is on the internet has little value to me (though perhaps to others), but will some work I have achieved close to what I wanted, though I am always fine tuning along the way.
Some will argue that the user experience can’t be replicated in an online source, or newspapers enable mobility or that online sources are inherently untrustworthy. Though I would agree that there is a simple pleasure that can be derived from reading a physical newspaper, I would disagree with the other points.
Online newspapers are certainly equal to, if not better than print with respect to mobility. The choices of platforms are expanding, functionality has increased and the cost is decreasing.
Ultimately mobile phones will become the most pervasive platform of choice. The primary value of a mobile phone is no longer for voice calls, but for text and internet. This will evolve quickly into the mobile device as an aggregator for rich content, content that is interactive and not available via print.
In developing countries you will find that most people will never have a traditional PC, but will have a mobile phone. In 3 years this will evolve into the primary delivery method of news for this market and something that will grow virally over the next 5 years driving print into extinction in developing markets.
The question of trust of content has always been an issue on the Internet. Trust is a relative concept when it comes to sources of information. Most people have the same method of developing trust in all aspects of life with time and experience being the most common metrics, with context being almost equally important.
It’s the same in trusting information sources.
Over time Reuters has earned a well deserved reputation on the quality of content and the ability to deliver fast, accurate and relevant information. One thing to note is that while stories from Reuters have an enviable level of trust, Reuters is not the prime source of the stories. Reuters journalists research their pieces from a variety of sources, sources where they have established the right level of trust.
This dynamic is rapidly changing, much of which can be attributed (directly or indirectly) to the Internet. The Internet has brought massive scale to the distribution to what can be loosely termed as content. But the most disruptive part of this scale is not in reaching the masses, but in fact is in the ability to economically deliver a more personalized experience in content consumption.
With economical distribution of niche content being feasible the challenge has become how to generate trusted content. One response to this challenge would be crowd sourcing via blogs for in-depth content and Twitter for headlines. The issue of trust comes in play yet again.
We are in the early stages of this phenomena and I would argue that the movement to a model that has crowd sourcing as a component is sustainable and will be the norm in the not so distance future. What that model will look like is uncertain, though I would say that it will dramatically evolve in the next 3 years and will not resemble the models that exist today.
One possible model that I developed in a past life about 10 years ago was the concept of a Knowledge Broker. The concept would be for content creators and content distributors/consumers to be connected in a pseudo community/exchange where content could be traded and/or bought with standardized agreements for redistribution, etc.
Over time, communities can enable an environment where trust can be built between parties and distributors/consumers can connect with subject matter experts to receive the level of granularity they require. Trust will not happen quickly, but remember the Reuters reputation didn’t happen overnight either.
Comments and questions are always welcome.
