News Finds Me

Earlier today, Steve and I were discussing how we get our news. He prefers to go out and get his news, while I want my news to come to me. Case in point, I (currently) have 112 subscriptions in my RSS news reader. I typically read somewhere between 100 and 200 posts per day.  (n.b. “read” is actually “skim”. I only “read” those items for which I have a particular interest). Now before you fly off the handle, Robert Scoble, a technical evangelist for Microsoft, reads about 622 posts each morning.

While focusing primarily on political news, this article in the New York Times finds that

younger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter

This is indicative of news in general, not just political news. Where do Catholics go to get news? Most online Catholics would say that they go to popular Weblogs to get news. What they do from there is anyone’s guess. Post it to a blog? Facebook? Discussion Fora? Email? Twitter?

Almost two weeks ago, Steve identified a correlative trend. Big media needs to get in line or get out of the way.

But, here’s the funny thing. Big media could’ve, would’ve, should’ve been on the cutting edge of these trends. Payment, based on page views, of armchair pundits blogging on the official news website would have maintained the Big Media centralization of power. Instead, guys like me do it for free.

Now, Big Media have a few choice left, one of which is:

to focus more on making it easier for people to share and annotate the news, rather than just trying to draw people in to read/watch/listen to the news they have.