I believe the future of news is…

Fast Twitch news ie; Michael Jack son is dead! will continue to spread through the face book and twitterverse rapidly. There’s no copy right on simple factual informa tion. That level of news “production” is already so splintered so as to have less signif icance to a news organization’s bottom line EXCEPT for those that have cultivated a reputation as news breakers ala TMZ.com.

Slow Twitch news ie; A look back at the whole season for the New Orleans Saints analyzing the most critical moments that lead to them going to the Super­bowl with exclusive photos and video…This kind of news will be worth paying for. It will be protected from deep linking. It will be contained within propri­etary formats (think iPad) and any non authorized copying or use will be vigor­ously litigated (think Nap ster). It will be behind a paywall.

It’s very hard to contain information. The web broke the news monopoly but the
news organization was built by the ability to contain and present the news.
The aggregation of the audience was (and is) what matters. Not what the content is
or how good it is or how in depth it is. How many examples would you like?
TMZ.com is huge but does not present beautiful photos or in depth analyses.

High quality journalism is expensive so clearly the low quality fast twitch news will fall to the tweets and other social media and the better stuff, the stuff that actually matters will cost you something.

While overlapping and interrelated, these issues are distinct. I’ll look at one: I don’t thing the journalistic model is broken.

That the Dallas Morning News was scooped by ESPN.com is not surprising: print is distributed once a day; the Web is 60/60/24/7. It used to be that newspapers had the monopoly on distributing news. Radio and television began to scoop the stories, and still can, but only in 30 second sound bites.

Now all old media face a faster competitor. But it’s not the journalistic model that is broken, and throwing money at it won’t fix it.

Congress could pour billions of dollars into a bailout or into subsidies for newspapers, and The News still would have been scooped. We don’t expect Newsweek or The New Yorker to have the latest factoids. They’re weeklies. Harpers and The Atlantic are monthlies. They are competitive against daily newspapers for their depth, not their speed.

Dailies still serve the folks — and yes, there are those living among us — who do not want their news from the Web, who do not have tweets pushed to their cell phones. Technophobes, some; luddites, possibly. But I, for one, like the voice of the newspaper: a calm and reasoned tone, slightly cynical, somewhat skeptical, definitely removed from the hype and the hyper. I want to read a complete report after the chaff of rumor and speculation has been separated out and blown away.

And depth. I rarely can figure out what people are all atwitter about 140 characters at a time: the context is buried under a thousand twits and tweets. Blog posts may link back to the original articles. I find I’d rather get the opinion later, but give me the full story first, in a form I can read at my own pace, at my own convenience, at my own leisure.

If the editors at the Dallas Morning News, and other papers, haven’t figured that out yet, then I’ll concede their journalism model is broken.

Now, since advertising dollars have flown and corporations keep newspapers only for high profits, we see journalists getting laid off. Those who are left don’t have the time or resources do the work they need to. They neither can pursue stories in depth, nor keep up with the Web.

But how to fund journalism needs to be a separate discussion.

I am curious about the idea of a National Public Newspaper, similar to NPR.