What will happen to the read-only?
Posted by lewisa on October 31, 2008
A few weeks ago, in the best lecture I’ve ever attended (and there have been many), Dr Andy Williams , of Cardiff University , suggested that it was just 1% of the news consuming population who like to contribute UGC and regularly participate in interactive news. Be it posting comments, chatting in forums or uploading content, only 1% of people do it as standard. Another 9% will participate from time-to-time, but not regularly, leaving 90% of people as read-only consumers.
Now, if people in the industry continue to focus on ideas like the model suggested by the absent Alison Gow , in a presentation last week, whereby journalists could post first drafts of news stories on blogs (ready and waiting for user contributions and changes), news updates can be sent by Twitter messages, the latest updates can be live-streamed onto websites…etc. If (remarkable and innovative – no argument) ideas like these are focused on with the ardour and determination characteristic of new media developments, what will happen to already dwindling newspaper industry ? And the internet-less readers left behind by the technological news revolution?
Will the news become biased towards the tech-savvy who regularly contribute? Will a knowledge divide emerge between the economic advantaged who have more internet access than the less privileged? Will news production become more focused on allowing user interactivity than getting the hard, accurate story? Or will it revolutionise the access journalist have to information, and make news more instant, reliable and representative of all areas?
I guess the problem is that nobody knows, and as such, perhaps more should be done now to save print, and offline news resources for the 90% who prefer to just read.
egrommet said
The problem is that the 90% don’t prefer to read. Sales are dwindling quite rapidly.
I was reading some mag sales figures for this year, and combining that with figures for TV and newspapers it is clear that something has got to change.
I agree that we can’t move away from print, but how we organise it is an issue. Think of a city th size of Cardiff (pop 305,353) and then think how much the local papers sell – ABC figures up to June this year showed the South Wales Echo selling 44,624.
Even if you ASSUME a readership figure of 3 – quite high – that still isn’t a massive figure.
Some would argue the news offline is slanted towards an aging demographic which is not representative of the community at large – ring any bells?
You make very good points, the problem is that there is not yet a right answer to this. But you are right, we have to look at how to cover our community – unless the publication decides that we should be targetting another one.
One option is reverse publishing, but not entirely convinced by that.