The news will find us
Brian Stelter has an excellent piece in today’s New York Times about young people and their different relationship with media in this campaign. As Pew has pointed out, young people especially (and people of all ages) act as conduits as much as consumers. And they expect to watch video themselves. This is also a clear example of how the peer replaces the editor. My favorite line:
Ms. Buckingham recalled conducting a focus group where one of her subjects, a college student, said, “If the news is that important, it will find me.â€
You have to drop that bottle in the ocean, or no one will find it.
And this:
Rather than treating video-sharing Web sites as traditional news sources, young people use them as tools and act as editors themselves.“We’re talking about a generation that doesn’t just like seeing the video in addition to the story — they expect it,†said Danny Shea, 23, the associate media editor for The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com). “And they’ll find it elsewhere if you don’t give it to them, and then that’s the link that’s going to be passed around over e-mail and instant message.â€
Now compare and contrast this with Lee Gomes in the Wall Street Journal, who can write clueful and clueless columns on the internet. His latest should be dropped in the latter bucket. He’s just not sure what to make of this internet thing and its impact on politics. Could be bad, could be good. Hmmmm. Web videos, especially on YouTube, are a good place to start. They have been called the death of the TV sound bite, for the way voters can experience lengthy realities without the filters of a news show constrained by time limits and commercials. The 37 minutes of Sen. Obama’s race speech quickly became one of the most widely downloaded.
Less clear is whether YouTube will be just as bad, or worse, at blurring the line between a fair point and a cheap shot than newspapers or TV ever were.
That’s he problem with columns: You have to write them even when you don’t have anything to say. I’ll wait for his next one.
:Later: TechPresident reports the ratings for the Obama race speech: More than 4million views for the speech or excerpts on YouTube.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:08 am
Oh. The NEW YORK Times.
I see.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Sorry, Matt. So Americentric of me. Amended.
March 27th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Cheers .
I always include an NYT story in my Daily Roundup.
March 27th, 2008 at 11:16 am
The thing is — well, one of the things — is that everyone who has e-mail, even newspaper editors and publishers, has gotten and probably sent links to friends. Share this joke or that insightful column. Been acting as conduits ourselves when the young people were in grade school.
So why didn’t all of us old media types, rather than just a few, realize the power of how news was now being spread? We were too blind to realize it what we were doing and understand the ramifications. We could have captured lightning. Well, maybe not lightning, but a spark at least.
Makes me sad that we didn’t get it 8 or 9 years ago when we should have.
March 27th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
anybody happen to be online at around 7p a week ago sunday? (that’s the time the bear stearns deal was first announced).
i was.
within 5 minutes it was everywhere… bloomberg, cnn, msnbc, AND the stock message boards were humming all night long.
news is instantaneous. and since we’re learning it is a process rather than a finished product appointment newscasts and dead tree editions are past the borrowed time thing.
March 27th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
This seems to go to the bigger issue - definition of the news cycle. tdc’s comment is spot-on. We live in a world of news in real-time. Every story is developing. My sense of Brian’s writing is we need to ensure we are in the export business, making digital assets discoverable and friendly to export/sharing. The days of import, the mission of attracting traffic along w/ associated holy grail metrics of pv and unique are approaching end stage. Shirky is correct in his reading that we are all media.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
[...] to is Brian Stelter, boy-blogger at CableNewser and now New York Times scribe. I praised his story earlier today but didn’t realize until I picked up the print edition that he got great Page One play. [...]
April 14th, 2008 at 5:37 am
[...] a news story. But we might have found that via links from our peers who tell us it’s news (“if the news is important, it will find me”). Either of those might have linked to source material from a company or government site — [...]
April 19th, 2008 at 11:35 am
[...] BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » The news will find us “Less clear is whether YouTube will be just as bad, or worse, at blurring the line between a fair point and a cheap shot than newspapers or TV ever were.” (tags: change news politics media+evolution perceptions interpretation video sharing services tidbits+fodder) [...]
April 19th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
[...] The news will find us - BuzzMachine “If the news is that important, it will find me.†(tags: internet socialmedia newspapers news journalism politics attention) [...]
April 26th, 2008 at 7:52 am
[...] e può creare una servizio. Ma noi potremmo averlo trovato anche grazie ad una segnalazione (“se la notizia è importante, mi troverà”). In entrambi in casi si potrebbe avere fatto riferimento alla fonte materiale di un’azienda [...]