This post is the continuation of a half-formed thought I posted on my personal blog a few days ago. It’s about starting to understand the ways in which the digital world has changed, and is changing, the way we think about news itself. Before starting, I did a quick search for the words ‘journalism’ and ‘commodity’ on Google. Here are a couple of excepts from what I found that I think help frame the discussion:

“[My friends] prefer the quality newspaper over the cheap news site. Yet they’re not paying for the content. I don’t blame them. If you can get it for free, why would you give even one penny? Plus: online news has become a free commodity. It’s not in people’s mindsets to wire some money to some newspaper’s bank account for a smashing piece on the future of energy.”

- dutchproblogger.com

“What many print outlets are guilty of is letting journalism go while placing a laser-like focus on reporting. And reporting is dead.  Well, not dead, but has been made into a commodity by the web.  Consumers of news don’t want to pay for reporting anymore because they can get it for free via mobile phones, PDAs, computers and laptops.  Reporting is what the internet is really good at.”

- hightalk.net

“Asked whether investigative journalism was under threat from the pressures of the modern media industry, Arlidge said the internet could be an asset. He said he had feared Goldman Sachs’ ‘spin machine’ would kill his story once it broke, but its fast spread online prevented this. Good stories as a commodity still held value, he said, even if the future of print looked troubled.”

- Kaye Wiggins

“As I said here many times, we are now facing three types of news: the Commodity one (everyone gets the same account of the oil spill in Louisiana or the deadly unrest in Thailand); Mashup news (the more it buzzes, the better it works); and the Quality Niche, that tries to defend its standards.”

- the Monday Note

“ABC News President David Westin hits the nail on the head with his remarks (watch video from Blip.TV here) at the McGraw-Hill Media Summit when talking about the commoditization of news. ‘There’s a certain amount of news information that’s a commodity. It just is,’ he said, explaining that many stories are available everywhere on the web … So he tells his ABC News staff that ‘news may be a commodity, but reporting is not.’”

- lostremote.com

“What we’re talking about is simple: non-investigative print journalism is a commodity. It’s not much more complicated than that. Reporting as the art of regurgitating the traditional who, what, where and when’s demise probably began with the rise of TV, maybe even the radio. Today, everybody knows everything. Fast.”

- tecosystem.com

“But consumers, for our part—and, of course, from the journalism-as-commodity perspective, our part is paramount—appreciate almost instinctively the narrative tension between the world as we experience it and the world as journalism packages it.”

- CJR Online

All these sites are available in our Media feed and at the links provided beneath the excerpts. While there are lots of people talking about the issue, and using many different terms, it seems that a consensus is emerging. There are different kinds of news out there, and they are differently suited to online mediums. For the sake of argument, I’ll do my best to break them down, talk about each, and try to place them in a larger context.

News as Commodity

The internet, as a distribution mechanism, has virtually eliminated the traditional concept of a “scoop” when it comes to breaking news. Real-time networks, search, and alert technology have made the time gap between first publication and mass distribution insignificant. If a bridge collapses, or a bomb explodes, or a sports team wins, it takes less than a few seconds for that information to travel through the web and into every corner of the globe. It’s powerful, amazing, and immediate. Even less immediate and objective realities – the recent departure of Gen. McChrystal, for example – are communicated almost instantly. These types of information are what I mean by news as a commodity. Wikipedia defines a commodity as “a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. It is fungible, i.e. the same no matter who produces it.” For most of what we might consider traditional reporting on the web, I think this definition applies. Whether I read this information from the New York Times or from an independent blogger is rather insignificant and largely a matter of which story appears first in search results or, increasingly, social streams like Pinyadda (come and get us, Rupert).

Like it or not, this is our reality. It’s not to dismiss the differences between follow-on pieces or the quality of analysis that most certainly exist between large publications and small bloggers. The point is simply that the distribution advantages once held by major newspapers and media institutions are no longer relevant when it comes to news as commodity.

The advantage that larger publications still have lies in their human capital and their ability to create news as value. But as you’ll see – even that advantage is shrinking.

News as Value

News as value is almost everything else. It’s the good stuff – everything from the stellar New York Times feature piece to your best friend’s thoughtful musing on a topic they know well. It’s the kind of content that’s entertaining and informative because someone took the time to make it so; the kind of content that passes the effort contained in its creation on to its readers.

Big media institutions and traditional newspapers have two major advantages when it comes to producing this kind of content: their distribution edge (which is rapidly shrinking, thanks to killer platforms like ours), and their editorial capacity (which is being devalued by the burden of their fixed operating costs). But these advantages are far smaller than they used to be, and they’re trending toward zero.

On Pinyadda, we often see high quality posts from small publishers generating more engagement and discussion than similar offerings from bigger publishers. By eliminating distribution advantages, encouraging individuals to support and curate the content that’s important for them – content that they value – we’ve been witness to the incredible transformation that internet is predicating upon the news industry. It’s exciting.

Authors from small and medium-sized publications are producing phenomenal content that people enjoy. And their readers are doing something remarkable – taking it upon themselves to become the distributors of that content. It’s truly a seismic shift in the way we think about news, and we’re proud to be playing a part in enabling the transformation. We think you’ll want to be a part of it, too.

To get in on the next generation of news, where value trumps distribution, create your Pinyadda account today. Leave a comment and let us know what you value most when it comes to news.

Tags: commodity, media, news, newspapers, value

This entry was posted on Friday, June 25th, 2010 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Product, Publishers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.