A New News Paradigm

The True Significance of the Tablet

This blog post and the comments about it have provided me with a great deal of inspiration. This is actually the second essay inspired by it. The first was the previous post about the music industry. It was not directly related to the post, but it serves as a foundation for what follows.

When I was young, America got its news from two sources, its local newspaper and Walter Cronkite. Now, I say that somewhat tongue in cheek, but it really was true. I grew up in the age of TV, and Walter Cronkite really was that important. I am not old enough to speak to the importance of radio as a source of news.

In the TV age, we got our news from the TV, both local and national. Newspapers continued to be an important source of news. The newspaper was local, but through the AP, UPI and other news services it carried stories from across the nation and around the world. As the broadcast TV of my youth (yes, I can remember a time before cable) changed into cable TV, we were offered more choices, but the news paradigm remained unchanged. Instead of the nightly network news, we may have watched CNN, but the format and delivery remained familiar.

But, we have moved beyond the TV age. Yes, we all still have TVs and some of us still watch the network news. Newspapers are not faring as well though. We have entered the Internet Age, and many of us get our news through the new medium.

In the comments to the blog linked above is a reference to newspapers as a news aggregation. News aggregators are common across the web. But I think that many have failed to recognize that we have, to an extent, become our own news aggregators. Most of the people I know get their news from many sites.

It might be because we like CNN over MSNBC but it may also be (and in my opinion more likely) that we do not get all our news from one site. And, it is not just that we use more than one news site, but that we use specialized or focused sites. I don’t go to MSNBC or CNN, I go to Fox sports for sports news and Gizmodo for techie news and then I check the formula one site, and…

I think you get the picture. I don’t rely on any one site for my news. I browse several sites, grazing here and there finding what I want and consuming it.

And I think that many of you are like me.

This change, which I think has already occurred, has had and could have several far reaching effects. One will be discussed in a future essay, where I will be working together ideas from this essay and the previous one.

Now, back to Fakesteve and his idea that the tablet will be tied to some “…entirely new way to convey information…” I think that he too has missed something.

It’s already happened.

Well, that’s not completely true, at least not the way that Fakesteve is thinking about. Many sites already include video when they can. Gizmodo is a good example. We have moved well past the old standard of news, from a few aggregators to hundreds or thousands, from generalized to specialized, and from single media to mixed media.

No one knows what the next change will be, but I believe it is a mistake to think that there will be one new way to convey information and to bind yourself to one “format”, or to withhold a product waiting for “it” to appear.

The future is diversity. I am not sure that there will be a single new standard for conveying information. There may not be a new equivalent to the newspaper or TV.

The iPhone did not succeed at changing the landscape alone. Without iTunes and the Appstore, the iPhone would be just another cellphone.

The tablet, whether Apple’s or Courier or any of the existing tablets are going to change the landscape only when content providers and programmers start to create content and apps formatted and aimed at tablets.

Maybe Steve Jobs can pull that off, but I think that the change will come, even without him.