For many of those who were been present at the first meeting of the consortium in March 2005, and watched/helped the consortium evolve to where it is now, this meeting marked a significant change.  A few years ago, the idea of editorial collaboration among members was a big no-no.  Imagine exposing sunlight to vampires. That’s how quick some ran away from that conversation. A few  years ago, the understanding around community building/engagement was frowned upon (not just by media consortium members, but by the journalism sector at large).  But my, how perceptions have changed.

Now the ideas of collaboration and engagement are not just viewed as important, but are seen as essential to the future success, impact and sustainability of the progressive media sector.  These topics were a major focus for the meeting agenda and in small-group and one-on-one conversations among meeting attendees.  This drastic change has come about for two reasons.

1. Technology has broken down the barriers of collaboration, fostered more relationships among media producers, and encouraged their actual engagement and communication with their users.
2. The economic situation facing many organizations has given them no choice but to find new creative, collaborative ways to work together and with their users.  This may be the only good thing that has come out of the economic troubles that journalism organizations are facing.

2010–>2015
The Media Consortium performed an illuminating exercise with our members where we asked them to project what kind of media organizations they would like to evolve into over the next five years.  As a baseline, I laid out four journalism “sectors” that I see developing now and in the future. I created short definitions for each of these sector and their corresponding roles/values each of these sectors provide in a short slideshow.

In 2010, most of the cluster of organizations placed themselves in the “Pure Play” journalism field, but by 2015, this sector is empty.  Looking ahead five years, most groups formed a cluster around “Hybrid Media Making” and “Journalism + Action.” Drastic, no?

For many journalism producers and organizations, this is a big break from the traditional role of the press to only “observe and report.” This shift into working/engaging with a community and deliberately moving them towards action will probably be seen by some as the opposite of journalism and its last steps towards dissolution.  Instead, I think this reflects the correct next step for progressive media makers. While retaining their journalistic integrity, progressive media makers must demonstrate to their allies AND to their users the social and political impact of their journalism.  Users (networked consumers of information/news) are no longer passive receivers of content. They want to be active players in producing and distributing the content.  More and more, they also want help in knowing what to do with the content.

What’s Next
Progressive media makers will have to decide for themselves how far they want to take the “action” part of their work.  Will they create spaces for users to self-organize? Connect them more strategically with organizations like Care2 or Change.org that suggest and organize actions? Or are there other options to pursue?  Time will tell as TMC members and others experiment in this area.

In fact, TMC will be working and experimenting with our members on this idea and others, including moving into mobile, editorial collaboration, revenue generation opportunities, community engagement and more through our 2010 Incubation Lab program.  We’ll be reviewing and reporting on the results of these experiments as we implement them. So keep checking in to see how the progressive media transforms itself from the inside out for a new media landscape. We’re sowing the seeds now for progressive media sector of 2015.

Welcome to The Big Thaw
An introduction to The Big Thaw from Media Consortium project director Tracy Van Slyke.

Vol. 1: Dissonance & Opportunity (includes Executive Summary)

This volume summarizes journalism’s old paradigm and outlines a strategic framework for independent media to build a shared vision for the future.

Charting a New Future: An Executive Summary
Journalists and independent media makers have always been society’s most valuable truthtellers. As the old system shuts down, how can media organizations use this crisis as an opportunity rather than a meltdown?

Building an Adaptive Strategy
To make sense of the new realities of journalism, we must identify strategic responses to a game that has already changed considerably. This post explains the Strategic Dissonance Model, which demonstrates what happens when industries change.

Two Causes of Dissonance
To turn strategic dissonance into action, we must identify its causes. This post analyzes the changing dynamics across the two overlapping axes of what we call the “Adaptive Strategy Matrix.”

Journalism’s Old Paradigm: Resistance and Denial
One of the biggest barriers to changing an organization or field is leaders’ inability to shed the paradigm from which it arose, which is a deeply held set of shared beliefs and practices about how the world works. Why journalism leaders have resisted—or denied—the paradigm shift.

Journalism’s Old Paradigm: Are We Facing a Glacier or a Flood?
While changes to the news industry advanced at a glacial pace for many years, transition often comes as quickly as the levees that broke in New Orleans. Media organizations must answer two questions in order to survive the paradigm shift.

Vol. 2: New & Emerging Realities

This volume analyzes in-depth the media industry’s current realities and compares them to journalism’s old paradigm. It also examines how independent media organizations can adapt to the changes around them.

Journalism’s New and Emerging Realities
The new competitive landscape requires media organizations to develop new competencies to succeed. Finding new ways to meet users’ needs and desires will be the sources of value that drive new business models. This post details the four questions about new industry realities that reveal opportunities for change.

New Abundances and Their Effects
New abundances have turned the economics of distribution on its head. This post explains the effects of abundances of information and independent voices.

New Scarcities and Their Effects
The new scarcities include time, money, attention and reputation. Publishers must find other ways to maintain users’ attention online, and for journalism organizations, building a stronger reputation could be particularly valuable.

Device Proliferation, Convergence & Their Effects
The challenge today comes from the tremendous number of devices that people use. Convergence is not only about creating different content for different platforms, but also about enabling people to easily consume and share any type of content using any platform.

Dawn of a Demographic Revolution
Shifting demographics create both challenges and opportunities for content producers: Different groups use media in different ways. This post explains the effects of diversity and the millennial generation on how media organizations engage audiences.

Declining Institutional Control and Affiliations
Many people today do not depend on institutions in the same way. This has forced media organizations to compete in a more decentralized, open environment.

Mirage of the Long Tail
The concept of the “Long Tail,” popularized by Chris Anderson at Wired, has become the basis for countless business models. This post explains the power of “power law” and the value of the Long Tail.

Cyber-cascades and Superdistribution
If independent media can strategically innovate, the sector can leverage its existing audience to become first movers of new technologies and platforms that will inevitably emerge. This post defines what cyber-cascades and superdistribution mean for independent media.

New Competencies: What New Capabilities are Needed to Succeed?
The new competitive landscape requires media organizations to develop new competencies as they shift from the old to the new paradigm.

Getting Serious About Community
Community building could become a new competitive advantage that would require journalists to adapt in various ways.

Strategic Technology
This post is a highlight of Vol. 2′s analysis on strategic technology, including being multiplatform, merging roles of journalist and technologist, low-cost innovations, and tightly integrated functions.

Counterintuitive Ways of Working
Counterintuitive ways of doing business and producing content may seem even more risky, but they can also be the biggest game changers.

Shifting Roles
The new competencies will help media organizations succeed in the new competitive environment. As a result, traditional roles will shift and overlap. These changes threaten many people’s jobs, pensions and familiar ways of working. Yet, organizations that can successfully make the transition will succeed.

New Sources of Value
An introduction to Chapter 3, Vol.2, this post outlines the emerging sources of value that media organizations can capture.

Progressive Ideas Vs. “My Ideas”
The new political and media environment has caused progressive media organizations to reevaluate their identity and tactics. Content’s value is is increasingly determined by how it relates to “my ideas” or progressive ideas.

Now is the Time for Immediacy
For journalism organizations to stay afloat, they will need to design faster ways to report news and emotionally engage users while maintaining quality.

Solving Filter Failure
Publishers are increasingly concerned about “information overload,” and some believe that technology has made this worse. This post explains how to use metadata to find content, for content to find users, and to solve “filter failure.”

From Using Users to a Conversation Economy
With the proliferation of inexpensive production and publishing tools and do-it-yourself movements, everyone can consider themselves an expert.

From Audiences to Communities
Insight on how to best build communities and capture enough value from them to run a media organization.

New Business Models
As the sources of value and the competitive landscape have changed, so have the business models that are mostly likely to succeed. An introduction to Chapter 4, Vol. 2, this post introduces the new business models.

Emerging Operation Models and Cost Structures
As large journalistic institutions shrink, salaries will inevitably decline and journalists will also have to produce more and take on more than reporting multifaceted. Media organizations that figure out how to do more with less will likely win.

Micropayment and Micro-fundraising from Users
A discussion of the idea of news as a “loss leader,” a product sold below costs to create other sales.

Getting More From Advertising
Advertising still has great potential to generate the resources that independent media-makers need to have a much greater impact, as well as reach new audiences. Three opportunities stand out as ways to get more from online advertising.

Vol. 3: The Future?

This volume surfaces key uncertainties to consider and future possibilities that may further change the game in coming years.

Will Philanthropy Adjust its Role?
As philanthropists use their capital in smart ways to improve social capital markets, they can build a stronger ecosystem to grow independent media. A big question is “How can they integrate these funding areas more strategically?”

What Will Commercial Media and Technology Companies Do?
Big companies will continue to support many new independent voices if they find profitable business models in doing so. If they pull back, it could ultimately hurt independent media.

What Role Will Government Play?
If government officials had the will, they could support the public value of media in many ways besides loosening up anti-trust regulations for failing newspapers. How far they will go remains to be seen.

Future Possibilities
An introduction to the next series of posts in Vol.3, this post poses important questions for independent media to consider as it shapes the future and nine possible trends that could further change the game.

Location Aware Mobile
Mobile devices’ ability to detect a user’s exact location will revolutionize how we find, discover, create and interact with information.

Human-Centered Design
As mobile and multisensory devices proliferate and alternative economies grow, media organizations will find the best path forward by following its users.

Multisensory Web
Video is quickly overtaking the web. Although people are consuming more information than ever before, they are reading less. The impact of text will decline further because of an emerging multisensory web.

Mass Mobile Media
The use of mobile phones has reached unprecedented levels worldwide, but this is only the beginning. As mobile devices become faster, cheaper, and more user-friendly, mobility will increasingly become a factor in everything on the web.

Social Reading
In the future, journalists will not simply report news for news’ sake; they will call readers to be problem solvers who think critically and iteratively with each other.

Radical New Ways of Meaning-Making and Filtering
The next phase of filtering will center on the evolution of the “Semantic Web,”  an interactivity evolution a step beyond aggregation that aims to makes information more meaningful and useful. Metadata is only the beginning.

Will there be a new demand for quality journalism?
Information becomes expensive when it is based on scarcities. One emerging scarcity may be the quality of investigative reporting. A consortium can help break “conceptual scoops.” Perhaps with standardized measure of influence and reach, money will flow back to the media organizations that did the hard work of unearthing the stories.

New Value Chain of Journalism
Journalism’s old value chain was delineated with clear roles and exchanges of value. The new value chain reflects more roles.

Creating a greater distribution of value
As more reliable and commonly accepted metrics emerge to measure content performance, the more that organizations can estimate the value they create. This post discusses metrics for engagement and social impact.

Conclusion

The American Way
If Americans believe that the strength of our democracy depends on a diverse and free press, we need a new paradigm for journalism to thrive.

Additional Articles

Slideshow: The Big Thaw
The slide show is a compendium to The Big Thaw. We pulled out the most thought-provoking information and implications for independent media.

Journalism’s Main Priorities in 2010 (And 10 Resolutions)
A compilation of the five most important areas that journalism organizations (and those invested in the future of journalism) must tackle in 2010—and some initial steps to begin moving forward.

This blog is an index of posts 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.

“We’re watching hundred of billions of [bailout] dollars being spent unaccountably to support supposedly our ‘American way.’ I think at some point we have to ask whether or not the ‘American way’ includes journalism.” – John Battelle

Do Americans view journalism as a public good that is critical to our country’s intellectual infrastructure and American exceptionalism? Do they believe that the strength of our democracy depends on a diverse and free press?

The “big thaw” of media’s old paradigm is drowning many traditional journalism outlets. If everyone—in the public, private and non-profit sectors alike—believe that journalism is part of the ‘American way,’ we need a new paradigm for it to thrive. “So how do you change paradigms?” asked Donella Meadows in Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. For an answer, she pointed to Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions about science’s great paradigm shifts. “In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep speaking louder and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in place of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.”

In order to succeed, The Media Consortium must speak with assurance about its strategic vision, work with those who are advocates for a new paradigm and not waste time with reactionaries who want to save media’s old paradigm. Journalism is evolving despite journalists and often without their years of experience. If journalists do not find new ground—even if it means dramatically changing their professional roles—they may drown.

By bringing together technologists, entrepreneurs and media-makers to increase experimentation, leverage their collective power and build audiences as communities, independent media can not only rise with technological tide, but also achieve the goals of inclusivity and fairness they espouse.

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.

As more reliable and commonly accepted metrics emerge to measure content performance, the more that organizations can estimate the value they create. And, others can estimate how much they would be willing to pay for it. Money will flow to where there is value in the chain. Marketing analytics are based on this sort of reliable measurement, and deals are done based on it. As metrics become better, publishers may be able to use new incentives for writers and producers. Also, a publisher could potentially convince aggregators to pay based on content’s performance. Aggregators could sign up freely or cheaply and pay if content spreads past a targeted threshold. If the price is low enough, and the aggregator can accurately measure the performance, it would be in their interest to share earnings in exchange for reliable content.

In particular, better ways to measure engagement and impact online will likely hold the greatest potential for independent publishers in the future.

Metrics for Engagement

For many independent publishers and aggregators, 60-70% of their online visits are for less than 10 seconds, and 50-60% of all visitors only come to the site one time. With such ratings, traffic number can often be a misleading sign of engagement.

Some people say that “page views” are becoming an irrelevant metric. In fact, many companies such as Nielson/NetRatings, Compete and Facebook are moving to “attention-based” web metrics based on time spent on site. Last July, Microsoft introduced “engagement mapping,” a way of measuring the return on investment based on how all interactions with marketing efforts lead users to take action. There is still disagreement, however, on the best way to measure engagement. Managers of projects such as Yahoo’s Buzz believe that comments, ratings, frequency of sharing and clicks are better metrics for engagement.

If measuring attention is the future of advertising, then why is there still so much emphasis on measuring page views? Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and contributor to open-source journalism project Newassignment.net, said the problem is a disconnection between the advertising and publishing industries. “The reason why there is an eternal quest for traffic, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also maximizing page views per visitor, is because advertising networks let you in on the basis of how much traffic you’re generating, and your eventual income is based on the number of impressions (and clicks).”

New metrics for engagement will profoundly affect all publishers, particularly smaller independent publishers who do not generate as many page views, but serve a niche that can deliver great value. Furthermore, if independent media organizations start viewing news as a “loss leader” and sell other products, engagement measures could become critical to their business.

For example, measuring the “average revenue per visit” (ARPV) based on advertising revenue is a common practice. However, people such as Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director at Asia Internet consultancy +8* and Co-Founder of MobileMonday Beijing, have called for new measures such as “average revenue from user” (ARFU). ARFU is based on non-advertising revenue directly from users such as digital goods (e.g. background music, avatars or casual games) or real-world products, which may be a better measure of a user’s engagement from a financial perspective. For independent publishers, it could include users’ donations. Joffe said that advertising has caused media companies to focus too much on generating page views, not making their services better. “Users are mere ‘eyeballs,’ while the real clients are advertisers. The revenue mix defines the service DNA.”

With stronger engagement measures a publisher can better estimate the lifetime value of a customer to make marketing and customer acquisition investments.

While advertising is making progress in measuring engagement, nonprofits also need to find better ways to measure how engagement leads to social impact in order to attract philanthropy.

Metrics of Social Impact

Most independent media organizations are driven by their social purpose more than business. However, measuring social impact is difficult, especially when it comes to goals that include influencing political dialogue, promoting progressive values, or launching a new meme. The complexity of factors contributing to impact online makes it harder for organizations to pinpoint their value. Independent media organizations must simply bear witness about their ultimate social impact through anecdotes. Nevertheless, the more reliably they demonstrate impact, the more philanthropic funding they can attract.

Imagine the value for social change that independent publishers could derive from tools that reveal exactly what online activity leads to social action.

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.

Journalism’s old value chain was delineated with clear roles and exchanges of value. The new value chain reflects more roles. One organization often plays multiple roles. In the old model, advertising also had clearly defined roles. It mostly concentrated on publishing and broadcasting. In the new model, advertising is spread across more players.

Since the market is still forming the new value chain, independent media can work together to experiment with new models, promote new relationships among players and advance new standards in measuring and valuing content. Individual organizations can use the value chain to explore strategic questions for themselves, such as:

• What role do we play in the value chain now?
• Where do our strengths fit best? And where could our role become most valuable?
• Is it best to focus primarily on one role or integrate many roles at once?

Here’s a graphic representation of the new/emerging value chain:

There are many possible ways the value in the chain could crystallize:

• The value of simplicity could lead some media organizations to focus on creating quality investigative journalism and leave chasing eyeballs to other media organizations that are willing to share revenue with them.

• Content could become even more differentiated. For example, stories with viral potential live free online, while more specialized premium content is used to build deeper, more loyal communities willing to pay subscriptions, donate, or make other payments. However, this move may rub against an aim to make news broadly available to the public.

• Publishers could use metadata to make information they produce more useful and valuable (further defined in Vol. 2, p26).

• Non-profit media companies may win greater foundation support if quality reporting declines, especially if they can more reliably measure that they preach beyond the choir.

• A “new social contract” between the press and the public could lead to more public support for journalism, if not also a shift in consumers’ expectations of free news.

There will inevitably be different places on the value chain to capture value. If smaller players do not proactively figure out their roles, the big players will likely determine them.

The answers to two questions will affect the value chain in coming years: “Will there be a new demand for quality journalism?” and “Will more reliable and consistent measures create greater distribution of value?”

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.

Brand explained,  “Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, ‘intellectual property,’ the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.”

Information becomes expensive when it is based on scarcities. Movie theaters can charge, in part, because a film is not available outside theaters. Attention and reputation are growing scarcities online. As users gain control of their information and identity online, the personal data could become the most expensive information of all and why the most trusted publishers will succeed.

There may be another scarcity emerging: the quality of investigative reporting. The price of news has dropped to zero due to information over-abundance. However, if the supply of quality news shrinks, it may create a vacuum in which the best writers and producers have renewed potential to earn money. In fact, Nicholas Carr believes a radical reduction of production capacity could actually help solve journalism’s problems. “The number of U.S. newspapers is going to collapse … and the number of reporters, editors, and other production side employees is going to continue to plummet. … As all that happens, market power begins—gasp, chuckle, and guffaw all you want—to move back to the producer. The user no longer gets to call all the shots. Substitutes dry up, the perception of fungibility dissipates, and quality becomes both visible and valuable. The value of news begins, once again, to have a dollar sign beside it.”

Conceptual Scoops

The greatest potential to capture value in journalism may be from “conceptual scoops,” a term John Battelle of Federated Media uses to describe investigative reporting that not only breaks new information, but also creates new frames for social and political issues. “Once you have a robust model for news online,” Battelle says, “that’s where conceptual scoops are going to live.” This type of reporting could spawn a new business-to-business model in journalism.

What happens when the pipeline for conceptual scoops dries up? Will aggregators have a new willingness to pay for them because they drive traffic? As a result, some journalism organizations may focus on investigative reporting and sell it to a smaller number of enterprise customers as “temporary exclusives,” rather than reaching for the broadest audience by themselves.

A consortium can help break conceptual scoops. Amanda Michel said that from her experience at Huffington Post, she learned that “a network, not an individual reporter, breaks news.” Nevertheless, the “scoops” still come from individuals who lead the investigative work. Perhaps with standardized measure of influence and reach, money will flow back to the media organizations that did the hard work of unearthing the stories. Similarly, paying journalists could have renewed potential based on stories’ performance.

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.

“Meta tagging” as we know it today is just the beginning. The Semantic Web builds upon any metadata (e.g. hyperlinks, location, time, movement or categories) to infer greater meaning from information.

However, Berners-Lee admitted that the Semantic Web remains largely unrealized. “They’ve been working on solving this problem for 10-15 years,” Soni points out. “But no one is anywhere near a product or solution yet.” He says that technology is the barrier. “It turns out that [automatically] understanding the relevance and importance of documents is hard.” Although efforts have a long way to go, each step will create new value for how we filter and make information more meaningful.

Who makes sense of the world?

The evolution of the Semantic Web depends largely on how we organize and structure information online, how pieces of information relate to one another, and how we relate to it all. This topic, called “ontology,” is a highly-debated area in technology.

“There’s this war between people who look for an algorithmic way to connect pieces and those that look for human ways,” David Weinberger says. Some people believe in automated approaches to tagging, while other believe in “folksonomies,” where we can figure out the main ideas of content by analyzing people’s hand-tagging, such as you find on Flickr images. While most technologists acknowledge utility in both, Weinberger says that depending on personality, they tend to favor one and never look at the other. “It seems to go fairly deep into what we think language is, what it means to be social, how much of the world you think can be synthesized and represented.”

There are flaws in both approaches. Weinberger explains that people mostly use hand-tagging to trigger their memory, not to make sense of a topic. Although it is a bottom-up approach, he calls it a flawed taxonomy. On the other hand, he notes, algorithms have not worked well either, “because people are pretty stupid about language and language is resilient against algorithmic approaches.” Nevertheless, he believes that it would be wildly foolish to think it will stay that way. “The scale of information is such that all assumptions about distilling information won’t hold.”

We do not need to place one top-level way of making sense over any other, which has been an implicit goal of traditional journalism. “The semantics here are in the users, not in the system,” Clay Shirky wrote. Therefore, the future of online journalism will be bottom-up approaches to making meaning.

Value of Discovery

A more developed Semantic Web will certainly help users more easily find information they want, but the long-term potential for journalism will be how it helps people discover new ideas and perspectives.

“Discovery is the untapped value on the web now,” Chris Anderson of Wired proclaimed at Nokia World 2007 and said filtering and information structuring is the solution.

In order to tap discovery’s value, media organizations could take two steps:

• Share metadata more broadly. Together, such data may be more valuable than if media organizations reserved data for their own purposes. Pooling metadata can help improve artificial intelligence, which drives the automated aspects of discovering new information on the Semantic Web.

• Take a long-term view of users’ online experiences. However, technologists, entrepreneurs and journalists share a key limitation in this regard: They can be overly focused on short-term results. For example, a Google programmer, who asked to not be named, said that the engineers and designers at Google usually look only at the short term. “Use-case scenarios,” a central tool for software developers, are typically created for users’ first ten seconds to ten minutes of interaction. This programmer believes tremendous value is missed by not looking at longer-term use cases.

The best-case scenario for independent media, according to Weinberger, is that “there will be structures in place that [enable news to] challenge me in ways that I want to be challenged, but that ten years ago I didn’t think I wanted to be challenged.”

For a complete analysis of the value of discovery on the web, download Vol. 3 of The Big Thaw.

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.

Cognitive scientists who study how the brain evolved say there were deep changes in our brain structures once reading and writing emerged. Marshall McLuhan famously describes how the emergence of communication technology as early as the printing press affected how we think, which had profound impact on social organization. Weinberger believes it is about to change again: “When you think of reading, you think of being by yourself, sitting quietly and reading in the hammock. Now reading may be a social act and this may change how we think.” The growing mobile, acoustic, visual and interactive web enables a new experience—social reading.

Television is already evolving into a more social experience. Just before Barack Obama’s inauguration, for example, CNN incorporated Facebook Connect. “For the first time, users could watch live TV online, invite their friends, chat with them while viewing and enjoy a social experience around Internet TV,” according to the Razorfish Digital Outlook Report.

Socratic Journalism

Now that online platforms have reached a scale for mass conversations, “social reading” may become the central metaphor for new media, which includes social editing and producing. This trend could change journalism in more significant ways than we have witnessed already.

How could such conversations be different from those on any social networking site? The answer might be in the role the journalist plays. Since reading and watching television was an individual act, the journalist’s role as an “educator” was paramount. People learned about current affairs privately, which equipped them to interact publicly. With social reading, people learn about current affairs and engage with others at the same time.

Journalists become conveners, facilitators and instigators in an inquiry process. They work with others to understand an issue more fully. Brave New Films, a member of The Media Consortium (TMC), has advanced such an approach to online documentary projects with Robert Greenwald’s “Rethink Afghanistan.” As a result, a reporter’s own skills and knowledge combine with that of users, to reach an outcome that is simultaneously more immediate, suspenseful, emotionally engaging, credible, and ultimately more comprehensive.

In the future, journalists will not simply report news for news’ sake; they will call readers to be problem solvers who think critically and iteratively with each other. Essentially, they go from declarative and adaptive reporting to being Socratic journalists.

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.

Although the use of mobile phones has reached unprecedented levels worldwide, full integration with the web has barely started. Usability is still the biggest barrier for most people. BBC News reported in January 2009 that 61% of users interviewed in the UK and US said setting up a new handset is as challenging as moving bank accounts and 95% said they would try more new services if mobile technology were easier. This signals the potential explosion of mobile usage as devices become easier, faster, smaller, cheaper and more integrated with the web.

Download Vol. 3 of The Big Thaw for more information.

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.

The impact of text will decline further because of an emerging multisensory web. Shapes and gestures are already augmenting or replacing text input on touch screens, game consoles (e.g. Wii) and other devices, and 3-D televisions and computer displays are expected to hit the market in 2010.4 We will eventually have the ability to transmit smells and other data about the physical world, such as air samples to test for pollution. For instance, the Defense Sciences Office in the U.S. Department of Defense, which focuses on “mining ‘far side’ science,” is working on a way to make multi-sensory data converge in real time, just like it  does in humans.

“There will be things we can’t even image when the web is more multisensory and we can smell and touch,” notes John Bracken of the MacArthur Foundation. New devices of all kinds will feed this transformation.

Journalism has treated online media as a “horseless carriage” rather than reimagining a new form of journalism suitable for a multifaceted, converging web. If platform convergence is challenging today, a multisensory web, combined with mass mobile-media will make the media landscape even more complicated. The time it takes independent media organizations to participate in such innovations may not be worth the short-term benefits. However, if they do not take radical steps to keep up with early innovations, the gap between their internal competencies and how people relate to information will become even greater.

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.