Some industries use the terms “upstream” and “downstream” to describe their work flow. One example are energy companies. Upstream is oil exploration and off-shore drilling—getting that stuff up from the ground. Downstream is donuts, Slurpees and pay at the pump, getting that stuff in your car.
Journalism has typically been an upstream industry, news gathering. The small tail end of the business model is a kid shouting, “Read all about it,” on the street corner. In other words, we slap all the news on a paper, and it’s your responsibility to come an get it.
That’s changing. With the advent of multimedia-rich, intelligent and cross-platform Internet content—collectively known as Web 2.0—new “news aggregator” Web sites, such as Google News, can sort through the world’s media and deliver stories to your digital doorstep.
It doesn’t stop there. Web sites are increasingly intelligent. Now the news knows you and sorts the stories you want to read. In fact, they sort the stories everyone wants to read, ranking content by popularity to generate digitally democratized headlines.
Where is this taking us? In the past, journalists haven’t had to worry much about marketing their content—names like “New York Times” did that. But with more content than ever—and every bit of it accessible—stories may not be able to rely merely on masthead mandates.
One day, a new breed of downstream journalists may be responsible for seeing that content is propagated across the Internet. Imagine an individual whose job is to follow a news story as it is hyperlinked, “pinged” and passed across news aggregators, bouncing from blog to blog. This individual may get the nickname, “hit man”, for driving up an article’s page rank through views, “diggs” and linked-to comments on related posts.
At least there will be work for all the early-21st Century communication majors.
Check out these must-watch YouTube videos to learn more about Web 2.0 and how it’s changing journalism (Thanks to danwei.org for these links):
Prometeus – The Media Revolution — Will copyright one day be illegal?
2014 EPIC, by Google — What if Google bought Microsoft?
The Machine is Us/ing Us — What is Web 2.0?
I’m sweating and squinting as I’m typing this post. You see, I’m afraid to turn on the lights or air conditioner because I recently watched An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary film on climate change by “the man who used to be the next president of the United States,” Al Gore.
There is no environmental lobby. Sure, there are those in Hollywood who throw their purses behind Greenpeace, but you can’t compare that to ExxonMobile’s multi-billion-dollar profit margins. Scientists have only their reputation to loose by being wrong. Exxon, their empire.
Drama is good, but most the plays we see are either set an era apart—Oedipus Rex—or involve people dressed as cats. Every once and a while, modern man is treated to a relevant drama, such The Death of a Salesman.
Blog Karma: Comment, comment, comment
In blogging, we’re all blogging Buddhas. Each post, a lifetime. If a posts attracts few comments, I could come back as the Internet equivalent of a grasshopper. If it receives many comments, I can hope to one day reach Nirvana of the Net–a top-ten Google search result.
The key is karma–posting on other people’s blogs. It’s as if the Golden Rule of the blogsphere reads: “Comment on other’s posts as you would have them comment on yours.”
I know you’re out there. You say, “Tim, great blog,” but never leave a comment. Bad blog karma.
Check out how some of the posts below have turned into all-out digital conversations between readers like Ning and Jenny. They’re both Asian, so maybe that’s why they have better blog karma.
It’s really about using the full potential of the blog as a platform for conversation with personal depth and public breadth. Imagine a newspaper where everyone could write a letter to the editor. That’s what this is.
My story, my article, my post–that’s just the beginning of a conversation. You start commenting, adding your opinion, sharing relevant links to other locations on the Web. Video, images, strands from other blogs’ conversations. Send me your honest feedback. If it’s really honest, then use a pseudo name.
The more people contribute, the more people will hear your voice. I’ve been posting on others’ blogs and gotten some pretty good attention. It’s pretty cool.
Make your voice heard about travel, communication and culture. Leave a comment.