The News Article Is Breaking Up

Jonathan Glick, The News Article Is Breaking Up

Long-form writing will survive and will do so by abandoning news nuggets. What emerges will offer a liberating business model for writers. Within the next ten years, long-form writers will accept that their readers have seen the facts of the story live as it happened, probably elsewhere. The longer content that succeeds in that environment will be pieces that provide the most value as backgrounders, news analyses, and commentary.

The good news for writers is that this dovetails with their financial and intellectual interests. Via a variety of social-mobile platforms, they will pass along facts and pictures as soon as they obtain them — or verify them, depending on the writer’s journalistic standards. Writers who are especially good at doing this real-time reporting will develop audiences who are attentive to their mobile alerts. News nuggets are highly viral, so successful reporters will very quickly be introduced to huge numbers of readers.

Through this loss-leading channel, writers will then be able to notify their readers about longer-form articles they have created. Unlike news nuggets, which cannot be protected and whose facts are instantly everywhere, personal pieces reject commoditization. Their value will hinge on the author’s subjective perspective, experience, or knowledge. They may be longer than news articles today, uniquely styled, visually interesting, or delivered via video or audio. These pieces will written to be saved to read later — for that time when the reader takes a moment to relax, learn, and enjoy resting by the side of the stream. Social and mobile platforms make payment much easier, so it will be practical to charge a small fee. Fifty cents for thoughtful analysis is inexpensive, and yet it is the cost of an entire newspaper today.

There is nothing sacred about the article for the transmission of news. It is a logical way of packaging information for a daily print run of a newspaper and a useful format around which to sell display advertising. It has survived into the Internet age for reasons of tradition and the absence of better formats. We have come to accept it as a fundamental atom of news communication, but it’s not. Given faster, easier alternatives, the article no longer makes sense to mobile users for consuming news.

News will go one way, into the stream as scannable updates, and analysis will go the other, toward a new long-form business model for writers. I believe it will be a happy divorce.

Glick is another person who sees the changing nature of reportage in the world of liquid media. His conjectures about the shifting financial model for writers are interesting, but he misses the larger philosophical implications inherent in the liquid media world he describes.

Now, Glick suggests that writers might opt to create and release fragments — facts, quotes, dates, observations — on the fly, rather than waiting to collate them all into a traditional article. And we may need tools to find all these bits, and pull them into some form that can be experienced like an article.

The deeper tectonic shift is that we are moving away from the notion of a permanent, unchanging, written object — the article — published in a specific issue of a specific publication, as the source of our understanding of events. And while the traditional article can be cited elsewhere, its existence and identity has always been tied to the publication. Nowadays, the ‘article’ may be just some collation of bits, contextualized by the reader, not by a single author.

The same old school publishing model was carried forward into the first generation of online media, and still remains in the current model of web publishing. This blog, for example, relies on Tumblr to produce a unique URL to represent my post, which is the modern, pint-sized representation of that fixed identity. My blog domain is stoweboyd.com, and posts generated here have that unique domain at their head.

But in liquid media, my words do not have a single fixed identity: their identity is uncertain, in the Heisenberg sense. They have characteristics of being a particle, fixed in space, and at the same time, a wave, propagating outward from the point of publishing, once the first URL is dropped into the world stream. A lot of what I publish is explicitly other people’s words, like Glick’s at the top of this piece.

The nature of streaming media has changed everything. Instead of posting our words on a wall where people come to read them, we scribble them and throw them into the stream, where they wash wherever the stream takes them. And, along the way, others repost parts, clip paragraphs and images from the original and the millions of copies made, until finally the existence of the original piece is best considered as its trajectory, its decomposition into whatever bits others found interesting, if any. Dozens or hundreds of new URLs are created, some pointing back to my original post, here on stoweboyd.com, but others point to copies, snippets, misquotes, or outright plagiarism.

Systems like Tumblr do a limited job of keeping track of the distribution and decomposition of our posts, but it is an inherently impossible task. There are too many ways for people to cut and paste, too many ways to repurpose our words and images, and anyway, the main channel of the world stream is not Tumblr, but Twitter. Twitter is where the stream is fastest, widest, and deepest. It is there that we look for the newest and most important flotsam, perhaps noticing the source, but often not, because the original source may have been lost along the way. Yes, we may have a URL back to a source, but that may lead to someone quoting another intermediate source with added commentary, and that can lead back to another, and so on.

From the viewpoint of the person in the stream, the ‘news’ that is floating by is experienced compositionally. The stream is like a palimpsest, where newer material have been overlaid over older, and you may be able to see through, or maybe not.

The decomposition of media content as it is decontextualized in the stream means that we each have to rebuild context anew as we pore through links, reposts, and others’ commentary on the bits.

In a liquid world, news is a mosaic, pieced together, and where every tile in the mosaic is itself liquid, made of streaming bits. So the wave is made of particles, but each particle is a wave when you zoom into it. News, and our experience of it, is therefore increasingly fractal. You can choose any scale, it seems, and find the same meandering stream at the core of things.

So Glick is right, as far as it goes, but more is changing than the nature of articles. Our experience of ‘news’ is changing, and behind that, us: we are being changed.

You make your tools and they shape you, Kenneth Bouldin said. And if we flow everything of importance into a raging stream, then we must learn how to swim.