Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Pew report-news is no longer a commodity and UGC is not the way forward

The latest Pew report on the state of the America has just come out.

It reports on a number of major trends

  1. News is shifting form being a product to being a service.That is it's no longer simply a provider but instead a way of providing information for help and empowerment.
  2. A news organisation or website is no longer the final destination for consumers
  3. The prospects for user generated content are no longer central to future development.
  4. The news room is becoming a place of innovation and experimentation
  5. The news agenda is narrowing.

Probably of all the conclusions,the one on user generated content is the most suprising and probably the best news for the journalist profession.

The worry is that the agenda is narrowing.Steve Borris picks this point up and says

What they missed is that as you moved toward media that exhibit more of the
defining characteristics of “New Media” — more “channels,” more fragmentation of
audiences — the narrower the news agenda became.


And in a way this leads back to the second point that news sites are no longer the end goal of the user.They are simply one step in getting to the source and understanding of the information.

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