Tuesday, September 25, 2007

newser.com Newser: A Vanity Fair feature asks is this the future of news -- or none at all?

Does news have a future? Author Michael Wolff writes in the October Vanity Fair ponders a couple of intriguing possibilities: creating a personalized news site, or that someday there may be "a world without any of this. One without the news."

He discusses the beta launch of Newser, a site that may serve as a model of a personal online newspaper.

Some quick quotes:

"My primary assumption in wanting to start a new news thing is that the news is meaningful. My civics-class generation continues to put high value on public life: the president, the Congress, the courts.

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"But increasingly these dysfunctional bureaucracies are of interest only to strangely fixated people. Politics itself is, more and more, a kind of obsession. (Indeed, people who do want news are people who seem dysfunctional themselves—obsessed, narrow-focused, militant, A.D.D.) Whereas a new generation, through the magic of the Internet, dispenses with this old idea of the commonweal and converts its private life into its public one."

In a group Wolff works with to develop a personalized news algorithm, he writes: "There are no 20-year-olds; no YouTube kids, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen; no Google guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin; no Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, talking about news, the news, on the Internet.""...If you do need to seek information, you don't browse for it anymore; you search for it -- the Google model. This precise targeting of interest means many news advertisers (sellers of autos, real estate, and various classified services, for instance) now have cheaper and better ways to sell. 'Classified advertising has been much more difficult than we expected going into the year,' said James Follo, the chief financial officer of The New York Times [Co.], recently announcing another quarter of bleak results at the company. Trust me -- He's the only person who didn't expect it.""A recent report from the media private-equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson sees 2011 as the year the Internet surpasses newspapers as the nation's biggest advertising medium."

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