There’s a fun thread over at Poynter’s Online News mailing list about what the future might hold for digital journalism. I thought I’d post my contributions here as well:
Steve Yelvington:
For a project I’m working on, I’d be interested in projections, predictions or complete wildass guesses about the near future. Say, 2012, just five years from now.
Hey, this sounds fun! Here are mine:
The iPhone — that is, the iPhone and the millions of knock-off devices — changes everything.
The “typical web browser” is no longer a rich white male with an expensive computer and 17” monitor. Millions of mostly young urban teenagers — both white and not — on 4” screens become the norm.
Sites that do a good job presenting a lot of information in a compact form — Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, etc. — do well, while long-format stories continue to get fewer and fewer readers.
Readers continue the trend of consuming news in smaller and smaller chunks, and brand loyalty goes out the window as sites willing to aggregate news from multiple sources have better overall coverage.
However WiMax also changes everything.
When those millions of cell phones all get pervasive broadband mobile video finally takes off. Long-format news stories do well as video (and audio) pieces, but are forced to compete with TV shows and movies also available through the same fat pipes.
Cheap digital video cameras combine with high-quality open-source video editing to obsolete Final Cut; everyone and his dog becomes a TV show producer. CurrentTV rakes it in.
Off-line web application toolkits (Google’s Gears, Adobe’s Apollo, Microsoft’s Silverlight, Joyent’s Slingshot) change the way we interact with the internet; the difference between desktop and internet software disappears.
Savvy news companies capitalize — by letting readers produce their own news packages, for example — but most don’t. Companies that want to take advantage of these new tools are forced to bet on a platform — it’s the Browser Wars all over again! Most big companies wrongly choose Microsoft and are crushed when Google emerges victorious.
Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock is a major success. This proves to be bad for news companies who curse EveryBlock in the same breath they curse Google and Craigslist. Most continue to ignore the fact that they could produce similar tools and just choose not to. Though sites like EveryBlock should be producing the next generation of Geeks-as-Journalists, most news companies just stick to old-school journalism. By the time they realize their mistakes, it’s too late. [Full disclaimer: Adrian is a friend, partner-in-Open-Source, co-author, and former co-worker.]
The software world becomes increasingly divided between Those Who Get Open Source and Those Who Are Doomed To Failure.
Microsoft launches a full-scale legal attack on OSS in general (and Linux in particular). They are momentarily successful in convincing stupid companies to adopt their tools (see: FUD), but ultimately fail (see: SCO). Businesses based on closed platforms increasingly rue their decision.
[Disclaimer: I am the author of a somewhat successful Open Source project.]
The Second Dot-Bomb occurs (sometime in the next couple years, methinks).
The big boys ride out the wave, but many smaller and more speculative “Web 2.0” companies go bust. Those that sold out to the big boys (Reddit, Last.fm, …) watch as upper management kills their good ideas through the death of a thousand cuts.
The geeks pick up the pieces and develop new, cool sites. Five years from now those sites are starting to attract venture capital as the cycle continues.
I’m actually pretty confidant about most of these. I’d put at least a $20 on each of ‘em :)
Comments:
No one should take that bet...you're right on.
I'd take that bet on the iPhone. The mobile phone model of connectivity is a highly proprietary and rather depressing future for the internet and web. Which doesn't mean it won't win, but I believe in good judgment of individual people too, and I think that mobile devices will break free of the existing market structure -- and until they do either mobile devices won't "change everything" (i.e., they won't become a majority of the visits to most websites), or the devices themselves will be based on a non-proprietary infrastructure (maybe made possible by WiMax). I don't think the iPhone or anything else on the market at the moment will be that technology that brings about that change.
Of course I don't like mobile phones at all, least of all as an internet device, so obviously I'm old and crusty and I might just be the equivalent of those even older and crustier guys who say that the web was a big step back compared to desktop applications, and you can tell that they want to say "and that's why it'll never catch on" but of course they can't actually say that because it's absurd. I don't *want* to be one of those guys. But I still hate mobile phones.
I couldn't agree more with your last point. Dot-com Bubble 2.0 is approaching *fast*.
I'd take that bet on "Off-line web application toolkits", I don't think that this is a promising thing for next ten years, besides, IMHO we won't remember what "off-line" means after ten years. "Very fast Internet access from everywhere with any kind of device" concept will arise and this is gonna change our understandings about web and software development in time.
Also I think we should be ready to see divided/abstracted networks in ten years. Like "Internet" + "SomethingNet -so called- secure and legal; brought to you by TCPA or any other big A".
My 2 cents..
I agree with everything but the "offline" app toolkits. I can see their usefulness and cool factor, but like A. Murat Eren said above, very quickly we won't ever be "offline". Except for maybe in places like planes, rain forests, middle of the ocean, and other places where it just doesn't make much financial sense to build out some sort of Internet access.
I'm not saying that the offline app toolkits aren't a game changer, they are in the short term and probably mostly with applications geared to people who aren't in any particular physical location for long. I'm thinking things like water/electric meter readers, service technicians, forest rangers, etc.
But over the long term, I just don't think we'll be offline much at all. And honestly, we'll probably treasure those few places where we are unplugged.
WHAT?! The Web 2.0 trend isn't a lasting.... aw forget it, it's too sad and short sighted to be sarcastic. I seriously can't believe people think Web 2.0 is an actual definition of something real and is really going anywhere... Ajax is nice and all but it doesn't make a business model. Community interaction doesn't spawn community funding.
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