Now is the Time for Immediacy

Posted Nov 24, 2009 @ 11:46 am by AlisonHamm

Filed under: The Big Thaw    

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Everything about the web is becoming more “live,” from activity feeds, micro blogging, live streaming video to real-time analytics. Consumers’ demand for accessing news, in particular, has become more immediate and granular. Publishers work hard at adapting to this demand while maintaining the value of content that requires time and synthesis to produce.

While many journalism organizations have succeeded with shorter cycles of reporting (e.g. daily versus monthly), much of today’s digital media is still prepackaged. In the future, demand for immediacy will become greater and push the limits of reporting and analysis even further. Micro-blogging and live online videos are leading this trend. (For more on micro-blogging and live online video, download Vol. 2 of The Big Thaw.)

Greater immediacy creates two key puzzles for journalism:

• Immediacy’s demand exceeds journalists’ capacity to write stories, yet it can make reporting more timely and relevant.

• Immediacy makes news both more emotional and biased. This rubs against the traditional value of objective journalism, yet can create a deeper connection with news events (e.g. Iranian elections).

For journalism organizations to stay afloat, they will need to design faster ways to report news and emotionally engage users while maintaining quality. Real-time reporting may lead to solutions by tapping the distributed involvement of users. Old physical limits required stories to be fully thought through before publishing. Now, story development and publishing occur simultaneously, which enables a “Socratic reporting” process, an open method of systematically questioning an issue or news event with users who become emotionally engaged.

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.