Jeff Jarvis has an interesting observation about the large volume of public-generated content around the iPhone launch. He says that unfulfilled by what’s being transmitted through regular media channels, people went out there, covered the event themselves then put it on the new media channels they’re already using to share content and information:
Something significant happened in the coverage of the otherwise insignificant and comically unnecessary lines that formed outside Apple stores waiting to get the iPhone:
The event was covered live, in video, directly to the internet and to the public, by the people in the story, without news organizations.
That is a big deal: the start of live, video witness-reporting. Scoble did it. More than one of Justin.tv’s folks did it. So did GroundReport.tv and Diggnation and the gadget blogs and more than I can list.
Not to mention, of course, all the reporting that went on via Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogs. . . .
As I said in that post, this necessarily changes the relationship of witnesses to news and news organizations. When it is live, producers don’t have time to edit, package, vet and all the things that news organizations have always done. They can’t intermediate. All that news organization can do is choose to link or not link to what we, the witnesses, are feeding, as the news happens. The news is direct, from witness to the world.
Jeff Jarvis goes on to suggest that news organizations need to somehow harness local people who find themselves on the spot for important news. We’re not too sure we agree with him on that bit though. 18 months ago I wrote an article on PSFK suggesting that a key threat to mainstream media would be the fact that one day, we won’t need to collect our news through central collection banks (such as news organizations) because we’ll be able to go direct to the local source. If national news was already getting their news from local news, we pointed out:
Since the invention of ‘news’, someone else’s local news has been old news by the time it reached you - even in this age of the web. So for one moment, imagine that we had access to all the local content from local TV and radio stations (and blogs) through technology like RSS, and this content was organised in some way like del-cio.us-style tagging, Technorati-style weighting and the way Wired’s Chris Anderson reads the press - not through news editors but filtered by the blogosphere. Why would we need news networks then?
PSFK: Local To Go Global? The Critical Weakness In MSM’s Future
BuzzMachine : iPhone and the future of news
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Not to be a debbie downer, but it wouldn’t it have been cool if Apple set up some sort of recycling program for the million or so mobiles they just displaced?
It’s just a small part of techie-green irony: how much energy is used by 2.0 junkies pounding away on their machines about carbon footprints?
July 3rd, 2007 at 9:40 am
We’re agreeing. I said in my post that that these feeds from events will be up on the internet somewhere anyway. News organizations will be left with the choice of linking or not linking. I do think that monitoring a bunch of feeds and finding the interesting stuff and alerting us to it is a potential new value for a news organization. I also think a news organization can alert people that news is going on near them and get them to start feeding. There is value they can add and I’m saying that they need to think about what that value would be.
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:57 am
Exactly. I’m imagining something more than just linking. Perhaps news organisations calling ppl at a specific locations just to provide immediate, on-the-ground info.
These people might have registered beforehand already with the organisation or via a proxy, leaving their phone number/email and payment info/member info for points. Or be mass-SMSed according to the geographical location etc.
July 4th, 2007 at 5:19 am
Photo Link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ijustine/662564299/
July 5th, 2007 at 9:29 am