Saturday, November 28, 2009

The engine is the content, the car the aggregation, and the engineer the journalist.

An interesting take on the problem of news (Ht-Martin Belam)

News consumers are mainly interested in news coverage, not content. Coverage is a service that promises to keep its users "in the loop" about what is relevant to them and their peer groups. It is delivered by selecting content on readers' behalf – i.e. through aggregation and curation – and while it relies on content it is more than that. Because it is an ongoing, day-to-day service, coverage is all about loyalty: once consumers find a provider they like, they come back to it. And because of hyperlinks, in the web coverage providers need not be content providers (and vice-versa). This means that media brands' power – including their pricing power – will increasingly be a matter of how well they aggregate content – whatever its source – and not just how good their content is.


Nico Flores writes on his blog On Demand media

His description of the example of the technology and the car is a great read and for journalism

the engine is the content, the car the aggregation, and the engineer the journalist
and adds that

Tim Berners Lee's invention of the hyperlink created the perfect frictionless interface between two formerly integrated industries: publishing and aggregation. It does not matter that this did not come about in the gradual way that Christensen describes (i.e. through a slow process of industry evolution) but as a quantum leap, before the industry was ready

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