The Future?
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The Big Thaw began with David Weinberger’s question: “How much more of the game needs to change, really?” In some ways, this is the future we have been waiting for. Independent media has successfully amplified independent voices and empower communities for many years. The online world has made this more possible than ever before. But in other ways, it might not be the future we had expected.
While people interviewed for The Big Thaw were optimistic about online journalism, they were uncertain regarding how it would affect quality and availability of investigative journalism, how consumers will behave, how the biggest players in the game will act, and which new strategies and business models succeed.
“One of the things we need to learn is that we don’t actually know what’s going on. We don’t know how information moves through the Internet, because we haven’t done the studies. To a large degree this information hasn’t been available, because we need a lot of cooperation to get this data, including from the government.”
– David Weinberger
Future Uncertainties
“We’re essentially clueless,” David Weinberger says, when it comes to understanding how information flows on the web. This unknowing is exactly what creates opportunity, especially when we let go of entrenched ideas. John Bracken of the MacArthur Foundation warned against drawing parallels to popular models too quickly. “If I had a dollar for every time people mention Wikipedia, I’d be rich,” he says. “People try to draw lessons from open source software and building online communities, but the types of skills needed are different from those needed for journalism. There is often more different than similar in comparisons people make.” More often than not, popular models for conveying information online have succeeded due to a perfect storm.
“We all talk about a set of things that have worked,” author Clay Shirky says, “but we wave big caveats over them because the failure rates are so high. For instance, Yahoo Groups, one of the most successful examples in history, easily suffered a failure rate of 50%. Many groups just failed to launch. And for many open source projects, about 75% of the time stuff never happens.”
We still face many uncertainties in how the media industry will look in coming years. The rule of thumb is expect the unexpected. Radical changes in technology will continue to affect the competitive landscape and the new competencies outlined in Vol. 2 will become even more important. If independent media organizations constantly ask the following questions as they innovate, they can shape the future of 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.
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