The Writing is on the Wall

I was invited to an interesting lunch on Monday, where I was introduced to Dr Georg Kolb (pictured, right), an amiable German, and the New York-based Executive Vice President for Global Consultancy & Practices for Text100.

A mixed bag of journos, purportedly the cream of Singapore's blogging crowd, were there to reflect on what blogging in particular, and Web 2.0 in general, meant for traditional media.

Dr Kolb shared that Text100 has recently set up shop in Second Life, the online alternate world created by California-based Linden Lab, suggesting that it was an interesting experiment in evaluating the flexibility of this newest of new media. If you pop along to Text100's 'island' you'll come across a welcome introduction from their company CEO.

Over some really rather pleasant French food, we agreed that proliferating sources of content were placing immense strain on journalists to defend their turf against encroachment from citizen journalists, and subject matter experts.

This 'Open Source' content creation seemed to ruffle the feathers of some of the other journos, who seemed to be obsessed with the lack of accountability of something online vis-a-vis something published by a reputable paper, such as Strait Laced.

SL's new Editor of their 'STOMP' participatory news service was an interesting lady; she explained that SL had decided that user-generated content was the 'secret sauce' (my words, not hers) for grabbing eyeballs for SL's online properties, and feeding back the word on the street into the newsroom.

I agree with the overall thrust of user-generated content, infact I think it is an inevitability (but more of that later) . However I was rather surprised about how candid she was about the appeal of the paper's lineup of straight-talking, independently-minded columnists. Apparently SL decided that nobody would read them online, hence the launch of STOMP ...

... call me old-fashioned, but surely if the columnists don't have much appeal online, then do they really have much appeal offline? And if their appeal is marginal, why not change the columnists, or change their editorial direction? Other newspapers seem to be able to attract a significant following for their columnists, whether online or off - and I thought the best of the blogosphere revolves around informed commentators shooting from the hip.

I asked whether this supposed lack of interest in the columnists was a reflection on the audience, or the columnists themselves - but didn't get a satisfactory answer.

It was around about this time that a correspondent for Little Strait Laced started talking a lot. With the kind of penetrating insight you've come to associate with Little SL, he explained that blogging was going to die out soon anyway - a revelation which came as a bit of a surprise to the rest of us.

"There's no money in blogging, so why bother? After a while everyone will get bored with it," he explained.

Of course though it will be heartrending, I suspect that people are more likely to get bored with SL and Little SL sooner than they'll give up sharing their personal musings in a connected online environment. So I suggested that blogging was simply a more scalable means of holding dialogues (or multilogues, really), and a means of filling the void between 1:1 conversations, and traditional mass media. A new kind of tonal option for people looking to say something.

But the newshound from Little SL assured me that the majority of blogs he read were boring, revolving around discussions of family, friends and work rants.

And that, I think, was my point.

Peoples' interests are local. National markets for information were based on traditional media requiring large audiences to create economies of scale - but internet economics has changed all that, and now people can spend a bit of time, and self-publish for free. In a sense we are watching the rise of a digitally-enabled mass vanity press, and hey that's okay.

It is just an alternative means of expressing the kind of kopitiam chit chat that human beings have always engaged in. When humans get bored of gossiping, then the bloggers will shut up shop - but I don't see that happening anytime soon.

We consume content locally, and our most immediate preoccupations tend to be local - therefore what could be more local than a media environment driven by content created by the actors that directly touch our lives.

This is what will increasingly consume the available media bandwidth of individuals - traditional largescale media will continue to be pushed to the margins, and the primacy of the traditional channels for content distribution will erode. That means that media, government, marketers need to learn some new tricks - and do it quickly, I reckon.

Ultimatelty the reason media exists is to transfer information as efficiently as possible between interested parties. The newspaper as we know it represents an aggregated audience, drawn by the masthead's content mix. Obviously not all of us are equally interested in all of the different sections of the newspaper - so in effect, we're paying for newsprint that we don't need. Therefore the traditional newspaper needs to be seen as a staging post in the journey towards a 'iPaper' - or in other words, a content mix that is tailored to the unique interests of the reader.

That doesn't mean the newspaper doesn't provide something worth keeping - I am a firm believer in serendipity, or the happy accident. So not knowing what you might come across in a newspaper is one of the joys of picking the things up. Also the traditional newspaper functions much like a surrogate search engine for those readers unable to steer their way to the content available online. Those who can Google, those who can't are stuck with reading newspapers.

But future readers will take it as read that they can source for content more easily online, than off. And how many of us have time for happy accidents? In a proliferating universe of content choices, we're stretched to read all the things we need to read. Therefore I suggest that the traditional newspaper, as an awkward assemblage of stories that may or may not be of interest to the reader, is on the way out.

However, it also points to an interesting future for content. That future is niche. That future is informed. Dare I say it, that future belongs to the kind of tightly-defined communities of interest that traditional trade magazines serve. How serendipitous then that this is exactly the kind of company that Alphabet Media is.