Here’s something you won’t read about in the papers: More people (like me) get their news from the Internet than from newspapers, and more people under the age of thirty get their news from the Internet than from television, as reported by the US-based Pew Research Centre.
This fact has far-reaching implications for the media, how we conduct democracy, and how we are all involved in creating, telling, consuming, and ultimately mashing up the stories that become history.
I applaud the trend, and am delighted to be part of it, as I have become increasingly weary and wary of the traditional media’s approach to generating news. Having low or no barriers to entry empowers anybody to become a reporter tell their story; competing against free services, established news enterprises are on a hiding to nothing to maintain their markets and revenue streams. At the same time, the lack of recognition and respect for the authority and provenance of information means that it’s all to easy to conflate opinion and fact and get away with it.
The trick for media entrepreneurs and investors will be to develop business models that deliver information that’s of a high enough quality to drive a real value exchange between the information consumer and producer … in other words, how to make a buck out of delivering quality.