2 things that need to happen to save journalism

Multimedia won’t save newspapers.

Hate to say it, but multimedia is just another way of telling stories, but not another way of making money. In fact, I’d guess that after training and equipment, many multimedia ventures are mostly funded by other parts of the newspaper. But that doesn’t mean that the internet is good for nothing. However, it will appear that way until the following two things happen: widespread use of mobile devices and “the algorithm”.

Mobile Devices:

The real problem with the media industry is that it is currently supporting the old form of distribution while trying to get ready for the new. It can be reasoned that there are several reasons why the industry has one foot in each camp. Not everyone has a computer, some still prefer the paper version, etc. Meanwhile, the business is stretched technologically, financially, and structurally as it scrambles to fill both print and online needs, without really being able to fully comprehend the final outcome.

The cure for this is the inception of mobile reading. Not the text based browsing I get on my crappy Samsung phone, I mean the “real” internet. Something where I can read complete articles comfortably on the subway. Of course the device and the plan would need to be as cheap as some of the cheaper phones now. Cell phone costs are always dropping, and that magic moment will happen when an affordable mobile device and a data plan mix with a media company who can deliver complete mobile distribution. And whoever does it first will make a killing.

There are several reasons most younger people don’t buy newspapers, but one of the main reasons is the convenience factor. Hell, I can’t even buy a newspaper without having change in my pocket.

I get most of my news in the morning from NPR’s hourly news podcast and Philadelphia’s free tabloid, the Metro. It’s free, on the way to the subway, and is a quick read. If I was able to afford a cell phone that had the top stories sent to it every morning, I wouldn’t need to pick up the Metro. I could sit on the train and page through my headlines.

“The algorithm”:

The biggest knock on online media is that people can be very self-selecting in the news they read about. That is, if I wanted to only read about sports, I can do that. Were I a newspaper subscriber, I would usually thumb through every section and learn a few things about topics I hadn’t considered myself interested in.

Online distribution (and the mobile distribution I mentioned above) needs a versatile and reliable recommendation engine (“The algorithm”). Not a simple one based on tags, or headline titles, but something that takes all of the articles I have read in the aggregate, and presents me with things I may have not considered I was interested in. I think whoever perfects this process will do what Google did to search engines.

Now, imagine if the computerized recommendations could be mixed with social ones. Currently, I discover new content when it receives a nod in the media outlet I am reading. For example, if a blog I read mentions another, I am likely to at least give that site a once over. But what if a newspaper site had a built in engine for recommending links to friends, and tracked the topics of those recommendations? From those two formulas alone, you could tell a lot about each user and could even drive your content and (gasp) advertising based on that data.

Of course the above changes are easier to write in a blog post than to be implemented, but I see both of these occurances slowly taking shape. And the day they are realized is the day we all can breathe a little easier. And maybe, just maybe, interns will be paid.