New Scarcities and Their Effects
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Some people have viewed the new media paradigm as a perpetual rise in disintermediation, in which authors go directly to readers. But mediation—and the organizations that benefit from it—may simply be shifting from one place of control to another. Companies such as Google are dominating the new forms of mediation: search and filtering.
In a keynote at Nokia World 2007 about the “taxonomy of free,” Chris Anderson of Wired magazine said that time and money are no longer the chief scarcities for people. The new scarcities include time, money, attention and reputation. He asked the audience, “Which economy are you playing in?”
Scarcity of Attention
Anderson views total attention as a fixed sum; you can gain or lose share. Media companies not only compete with each other for users’ attention, but also compete with the time someone takes to attend their child’s soccer game. To make matters worse, people are increasingly multitasking (e.g. checking email and watching TV). Attention is valuable because it is so scarce.
As the marginal costs of sharing information approach zero, so do the costs for users to switch between information sources. Publishers must find other ways to maintain users’ attention online, which they can achieve by increasing connection with and among users. Media outlets can also compete by using live online events to tap the growing value of immediacy.
Scarcity of Reputation
Google search built its PageRank on sites’ reputations; eBay built auctions on sellers’ reputations; Prosper.com and Kiva.org are building microfinancing sites on lenders’ and borrowers’ reputations. Digg and StumbleUpon have done the same in filtering news and information. NewsTrust, started in 2005, uses reputational value as a credibility filter for online opinion and amateur journalism, thus building greater trust and accuracy. Furthermore, many companies increasingly focus on gaining “mindshare” (a type of reputation). New ways to track online attention and loyalty will make it more reliable to measure the value of reputation.
For journalism organizations, building a stronger reputation could be particularly valuable. “Believability ratings for national news organizations remain very low. If anything, believability ratings for major online news outlets—including news aggregators such as Google News and AOL News— are lower than for major print, cable and broadcast outlets,” according to The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.
As we consider news abundances and scarcities, we must also consider the long- term effects of news organizations shrinking and closing. James Surowiecki claimed, “We’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce.”
Some will go into public relations work, while others will enter entirely new careers and take their journalistic skills into other sectors. For example, Douglas Frantz, former managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, now serves as chief investigator of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He said that he acts much like an investigative reporter, “but with two potential tools he could only dream about having previously: subpoena power and, should his application be accepted, security clearance to review classified data.”
Many former journalists are turning into social entrepreneurs and—working independently or starting their own ventures—and could benefit from the new, networked support systems that a consortium provides. The increasing number of career shifts among journalists has even spawned consulting services. For example, Amy Webb conducts trainings for “newspaper refugees” to build post-mainstream journalism careers. Wherever journalists go, they are not likely to be absorbed back into traditional news organizations that once supported them, yet they could be organized to shape a new future for journalism.
This blog is an excerpt from The Big Thaw, a guide to the evolution of independent media, written by Tony Deifell of Q Media Labs and produced by The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets. Learn how your organization can use this report. For more information and recommendations from the study, click here.
[...] can contaminate the credibility of the reporting. However, as the competitive landscape shifts from scarcity to abundance of information and voices, the ability to “cover” the news objectively is no [...]