Martin Nisenholtz’s keynote at the SIIA conference three days ago comes to me via E-Media Tidbits, the Poynter group blog. Rich Gordon also pointed to Larry Pryor’s 2002 article describing the ‘third wave’, with credit to Vin Crosbie (whose big promise comes due shortly). Nisenholtz is the CEO of NYTimes Digital, which publishes, most prominently, NYTimes.com.
Basic point of the speech: we’re just getting started in the online publishing world. A few pullquotes:
The twin attributes of early online services — aggregation and sorting — are becoming increasingly available to the masses, not just in the context of documents, but increasingly through access to all media.
As we all know, this has already disrupted the commercial music business and — in what I referred to in an opinion piece in Ad Age in November — portends a “control shift” in which all media move gradually under user control.
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Phase Three is as much about social networking as it is about information retrieval.
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Users will be able to associate content from a wide variety of sources, including filtered access to other users, through a common interface. Online communities will be available to discuss any “article” at any time of the night or day. A user lands on the article and discussions about that article are continuous. News reports become a focal point for social networking. Again, we see this bubbling-up in Web logs today.
In this vision, two very important boundaries which all of us have grown up with, know and understand change. The first is authority. In a newspaper or in a television news broadcast, the journalistic experience is one-way and bounded. In this new experience, sources range and are scored.
I wonder if Nisenholtz has read Amazoning the News? I love many parts of this vision, put forth in 2001, and I think the application of “share, inform, create, entertain, transact” to news will be dynamic.
One typo: psychograpahic. Not nit-picking, just noticing.
I appreciated his references to the famous Vannevar Bush “As we may think” article in The Atlantic Monthly (July, 1945). One of my proudest early moments in online media was being part of the team at The Atlantic that digitized that piece, first for AOL users in early 1994 and then onto the web in late 1995. The piece — for obvious reasons — had been online before that, probably even on the early bulletin boards and newsgroups, but we were proud to publish the words again in the same publication, 50 years later.