The Web Difference

Tuesday, April Fools….
Class 18: Is the Web a Mass Medium?

We had a visitor today – Andres Cavelier who is a Nieman Fellow

JP presented a slideshow from the Berkman center. The mainstream media feels that its revenues are declining quickly because of websites like Craigslist who draw advertised stuff to the online space and lead to a decline in eyeballs, interest and revenue.

The web democratized the media without a corresponding increase in revenues.

What will converged media look like if this trend continues? There are high costs to media business and less revenue coming in. We may love the democratizing idea of having different kinds of news out there but maybe there’s not enough revenue to support serious newspapers.

What is this web diff? Better world or worse world? What intervention needed to make better?

JP showed us a diagram of the different models of media outlets – divided by professional/amateur and for-profit and nonprofit.
- Professional and for profit – NYT
- amateur and for profit – Utube
- Huffington Post is more in the middle – for profit but relies on a mix of professional and volunteer.
- Nonprofit and professional – Consumer reports/NPR
- Nonprofit and volunteer – wikipedia, global voices
- :Vocalo in the middle – non-profit but has some paid contributors and stories from the public and volunteers

(Factors like paid/unpaid, edited/not edited is relevant to the professional/amateur distinction)

The following are different models of media outlets. *note – these are US model where governments are not involved or controlling media outlets

Publisher Model. This is the traditional one – reporters who are paid, commentators who are paid, editors are paid, publisher is the entity which gets money and then the audience is the recipient and pays for it through money or ads

News Agency Model: Reporters are paid, commentators, editors, and usually sell to other media buying the stuff. So Reuters is collected and then other media (NYT) buys it and release it with the rest of the info out to the public who pays for it
- the difference b/w Publisher and News Agency Model is blurred more in online space – not single edited publication and there are some volunteer voices in these too

News Aggregator model – reporters, editors, publishers who will distribute directly to audience and will also send to the company structure aggregator, who also releases to the public

Author-centric Model: the reporter straight to the audience – the blogger

Audience Contribution Model – the publisher and the audience interact – the audience will distribute and receive and recreate info.

Public Media – (BBC) – the money going to the publisher is through grants and sponsors etc

Online newspaper

Blogosphere – expands to large complicated system and harder to describe. Often is responding to mainstream media, not always own stories. A reporter will lead to commentators, then distributed and then to audience and will then respond back to distributors

Newspaper Story Picked up by Bloggers – money flows at the top of the main story and no money flowing at the bottom by the blogs picking up the stories and comments

Citizen Report to Mass Audience – activists to bloggers and then send to large media outlets, and there the money flows

Ecosystem – very complicated and a series of things happen simultaneously. When put vector of time over it, more complex.

JP Questions:
1. What moves can one make in order to get there? Legal, Market, etc?

QUESTION 1: As we imagine the informational environment, what attributes do we want it to have? What design Critera?
- Accuracy – truth
- Timely
- Diversity:
o Perspective (try to get at objective but brings one’s views so good to have diff voices on one event),
o Topic (trivial, serious, international),
o Format: want an audience to be as big as it can be and then allow the info to filter through.
• Sunstein argues that if you had a Daily Me – you can choose exactly what you want to hear. If have much diversity of info and then can choose what want, ppl will choose what reinforces their own views and not get variety of ideas
o Both free and paid-for media so ppl ca n both access the news and those who are more interested in a smaller topic have the option to pay for targeted specialization (like Miami Herald v. Bloomberg)
- Responsiveness to audience.
- Accessibility to audience (which may or may not improve our democracy):
o Through diverse format (above)
o Readable, exciting description
o Cheap/free
- Independence from regulation and state control, and advertisers
- Make effort not to lose local content
o Polled the class and no one seems to pay for local papers, though a few read them for free. Perhaps we are not representative of larger society though, and local papers are suffering tremendously in the age of the web
o Can making their ads more sophisticated to target smaller niches save the local paper?
- Empowering
- No government funding – but does every time the government funds the media, will it be impossible to neutral?

QUESTION 2: What moves can we make in order to get to this description?
- There is a tension b/w accuracy and timeliness.
- We have less diversity of perspective now – instead of many diff versions of a story where e/o had an international bureau, now there is only 2 or 3 out there. While this may be economically efficient it may not be supportive of marketplace of ideas in way we want.

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