newsroomnext

Summary: Journalism organizations are in the information service business, and must find ways to fragment and deliver their core competencies — information generation, analysis, verification and evaluation — on any Web site.

Uh-oh: With millions of Web sites (and counting) fragmenting an audience once forced to obtain information through one, well-controlled, non-Web channel, the challenge of aggregating, maintaining and growing a mass Web audience with the core competencies of journalism organizations — information generation, analysis, verification and evaluation — will prove too difficult to overcome.

Or look at it this way: Packaging and selling (to advertisers) the mass attention of a rapidly changing Web audience that goes wherever it wants, whenever it wants and exactly to what it wants will be a target moving too fast and too fragmentedly (yep, a made-up adverb) to capture.

But: The demand for information will grow.

Ah-hah!: Break your information into independently functioning business units or packages of services that go where your customers are. Enable distribution by those who serve niche audiences with their own specialized Web sites (read about News Associators, a future journalism role described by Steve Boriss at The Future of News).

Get ready for it: The journalism business is going to be much smaller, more fragmented, much more competitive and hugely open to savvy, independent journalists able to master a niche and make their content easily found and placed anywhere.

These adaptations will fail:

1. Journalism organizations attempting to mimic successful sites creating products or Web services far outside the core competency of journalism organizations. Example: Trying to be another version of YouTube, Flickr, MySpace or Facebook. However, buying YouTube and letting it be might work just fine. Oh, wait. Too late. But MSNBC snatched NewsVine in time.
2. Journalism organizations trying to monetize Web content in the same way that non-Web content is monetized. On the Web, everything must be useful, transparent and direct. Advertisers must think more like journalists. I will write more about this soon.
3. Journalism organizations trying to cover everything one one site. Specialize and achieve network node dominance by producing, filtering, analyzing, aggregating, regularly updating and widgetizing information on a story-by-story basis.