The future of news business is easy to see

published May 17, 2009 07:16 by admin ( last modified May 17, 2009 07:16 )

...if you bear in mind what the difference between mass communication and the new communication landscape is. In the old mass communication landscape, a few people produced for the masses.

In the new landscape, everybody can be a publisher, and everyone expects communication to be two way. This leads to the follwoing pieces of advice for the journalists and editors of the media of the future:

Your target group will not be hundreds of thousands of people, and certainly not millions. You cannot keep track of that many people, and interact with them or remember something about them,. Your future target group is a couple of hundred people, a couple of thousands tops.
You need to create value for these people. Value is something that you in this case cannot dig up on your own and just present to your audience, rather it must grow in dialog and in cooperation with these people.
...which means you are creating a community. Watch The Guardian, they already have a dating site, sporting people whose lifestyles and values are similar to the Guardian's own. And The Guardian charge for people to be a part of this (somewhat specialized) community.
You cannot charge for mass communication. Mass communication will be the free by-product of community communication

"The moral is simple: eventually someone will figure out a business model that works for online news. But it may take some time, and lots of outfits will fall by the wayside in the meantime. That's capitalism for you."