Facebook and Twitter are now the world’s biggest news distribution networks. But the future of news is still in the hands of journalists and content makers.
Sometime soon, we’ll be saying farewell to TV towers and printing presses. We live at the start of the era of digital distribution – all or nearly all of our media coming to us online. And more specifically, we’ve just entered the era of social distribution – where online social networks like Facebook and Twitter become a primary means of discovering news. Today, Facebook and Twitter will directly distribute more news to more people than any news company ever has in history.
News sharing and distribution is being re-engineered every day in Silicon Valley. Take for example the now-ubiquitous “like” or “tweet” buttons on news sites and blogs. Those buttons empower millions of editorial sharing decisions each day, and smooth the path for people to spread news to their friends. Those subtle little buttons have profoundly changed how we interact with news – every story is now a potential “share”. And we’re probably still in the social distribution stone age. Inevitably, many more innovations are ahead in sharing and commenting news to our social networks.
Social distribution gives “old media” companies yet another technology problem to contend with. Already these companies are dealing with the unbundling of their product and loss of ad revenue (property, classifieds, personals, etc.) by “new media” online companies. Now their own distribution is moving outside of their control, as links to each new story on CNN or the New York Times spread through Facebook and Twitter. The media companies can’t package up their own product any longer – they don’t define how their stories looks on Facebook, Facebook does. And to a large degree, they don’t decide which of their stories will be the “big” one each day – now, the crowd does. At the same time, news is becoming interactive, gamified, and some say it could become totally ubiquitous and without dominant platforms – “social, unregulated and all around you.”
With these big technology changes at play, will the big news and media companies – the New York and London of media – keep their grip on serving us our news? Or will news be unbundled and come in ways we can’t yet imagine?
Our bet is that New York’s big media companies – or their successors – will ride this one out just fine. Most quality newsrooms and big news brands will survive the new media disruption. Here’s why.
1. Content is still King
The internet, Facebook, Twitter – they’re just the new plumbing. Instead of picking up a newspaper or sitting down in front of your TV, now you get news digitally, often via your social network. And once you get to the content, you see ads, and the content creators get paid.
And no-one does content like big media companies with experienced reporters and editors. In the US, the news sites (excluding tech) that are winning at viral social distribution are ABC News, MSNBC, the New York Times, Fox News, ESPN, CBS, the Huffington Post, and the Washington Post. Similarly, in the UK, the establishment companies are performing excellently, with the Guardian, the BBC, and the Daily Mail all among the world’s top 10 most viral news sources. These guys just have the chops to produce the stories that people want to share. While every blog has its day (and some have become huge in the past 15 years), the expertise in the New York and London newsrooms is second to none.
The expression “content is king” was coined by media mogul Sumner Redstone, a former tax lawyer who took over his family business – a theater chain – but reckoned that content (movies) was becoming more important than distribution chains (theaters). He decided to get the family business out of movie distribution and into movie production, and eventually mastered the takeovers of Viacom (including MTV), CBS, and Paramount Pictures. Today, you can get content from those companies in dozens of ways, offline and offline. Redstone doesn’t care, as long as you get the content, and he somehow gets paid.
Today, news companies are producers of great content, and are – or should be – also becoming agnostic about channels. If news companies see themselves as independent of channels – as long as they somehow get paid – they can change quickly and embrace the new.
Of course, many Newspapers and TV and radio stations are still married to a form of distribution – be it print or a stream of broadcast. The newspapers and radio stations that have put an early emphasis on digital are now boasting above-standard digital footprints – and revenues.
2. We need trusted storytellers
While Twitter can “break” a news event – one person with 14 followers can be the first to publicly publish news of a death – we need storytellers to turn the scraps of information into a news story. Verify what happened, gather facts that aren’t already online, make sense of the event, and add context, meaning and narrative.
We already trust these storytellers, we know they have professional reputations that mean that they won’t publish unresearched facts or falsehoods. So we tune into them, instead of the random noise that many others generate on social networks.
New technologies can speed and improve this process of news gathering, but professionals with reputations still need to do it. And the best of those professionals continue to head to the creative clusters (and news companies) of cities like New York and London.
The best storytellers will be rewarded hugely in the “social” era because people are better judges of quality than computers. Each day on NewsWhip’s front page we see the results of the world’s collective editorial judgment. And the results are far more engaging than the educated guesses of computers. Already, Salon and Slate.com have found that deep, engaging news reporting (and investigation) can reap tremendous rewards as the resulting stories spread through online social networks and reach far greater audiences than they might otherwise.
3. The Old Media / New Media gap is closing anyway
Today, Reuters and the New York Times have social media editors. The New York Times, the Guardian, and the Washington Post all use in-house technologies to track Twitter and Facebook spread. The startup ecosystem in New York has produced some media-focused products, most notably Betaworks. And aggregators like Tumblr and Buzzfeed are now hiring journalists to produce content as well as curate.
As media companies adjust themselves to the new “plumbing” they’ll need developers and engineers to replace the guys who today run the ink and paper print plants. Engineers who help optimize stories for new platforms as these emerge. The fact that the pipes are now coming live from Palo Alto and San Francisco is important – we’ll see more engagement and cooperation between the tech and journalist communities in the future. But the pipes only give a route to consumers, they don’t define or control what’s moving through them. That’s up to users, and users are picking the quality output of top notch sources – and New York and London still do that better than anywhere else.
NewsWhip tracks how fast the world’s news is spreading through online social networks. See the fastest spreading news at NewsWhip.com.
For the latest on social distribution and news, follow us on Twitter @newswhip.
NewsWhip Daily social news service launches today.
NewsWhip then tracks all the topics you picked to see which stories in each make the biggest splash on Facebook and Twitter each day. And just before lunchtime, it gathers the top 3 stories in each one and puts them together in a single gorgeous email summary. Plus, if you use Facebook to connect with it, we’ll add a sidebar with the news stories your friends have been sharing.
We’ve added an advanced feature for real news hounds – you can get the “Daily” as often as every 3 hours if you like, and really stay on top of your field. If you check this option, it will pick the top 3 stories from the past 3 hours for your more frequent emails.
