Blowing up media
: Mary Hodder is writing some killer posts on a group blog for a media conference/thinktanky thing happening out on the West Coast that I would have attended except that I had scheduling conflicts and also suffer from chronic conferencephobia.
In my favorite post (so far), Mary’s notes describe for one of those break-up-into-workgroup sessions the concepts they’re grappling with:
-information networks or communities of people exchanging news, information and conversation emerge as the principal means of learning and discovery. Macro and micro Know/Trust Networks will likely eclipse traditional, informed intermediaries and gatekeepers as trusted sources of information
-all news and information will at some point be virtual, digital and mobile.
-individual’s exert unprecedented power. Individual contribute to and participate in the creation of portable, immediate and continuously updated news and information.
Most of that is known turf here: We the individuals exert extreme (and new) control. We demand immediacy and portability. We trust our friends here often more than we trust the people we’re supposed to trust (the big, old guys).
But this was the sentence that hit me as a wonderful way to express the bigger idea, of relationships taking over as the essential glue of media:
Information networks or communities of people exchanging news, information and conversation emerge as the principal means of learning and discovery.
Right. Our fellow members of what used to be known as the audience sometimes report and more often edit — and frequently fact-check — for us. They provide content, context, value, trust, marketing, distribution.
For years, newspapers wanted to be your friend. But in this world, your friends are your newspaper.
This is just a restating of screeds that have been issued before, and I’ve issued plenty of them: News is a conversation.
I look forward to reading more from out there.
: I tried to leave this as a comment on the conference blog but TypePad kept barfing it back at me. (Computers are editors, too.) If I had left it there, I would have said hi to many, many folks from my checkered past. So, hello.
