:: Future of Journalism

Review: 1Cast - Personalized Video News Casts

Kirkland (Washington-US) based Onecast, Inc. offers personalized news feeds or "casts" via its web and mobile-based video platform, which can be watched on your iPhone or Android device.

Casts are automatically updated with the latest clips from sources like BBC Worldwide, Agence France Presse, Reuters, CBC and Al Jazeera as they come in. News are available online just minutes after the original broadcast. Service is currently available only to US based customers.

1Cast is a typical News2.0 application which offers technology (personalization, video distribution to web and mobile, near-to-original broadcast clips) but without unique content. Without unique and relevant content sources the service is highly vulnerable. Also competition in this part of the news value chain of technology platforms is too strong in my opinion. Unless you have no exclusive access to content, technology alone will never be the road to success. News3.0 differs from this approach since unique content providers, the journalists themselves, are major players in the future of news.

WAZ Mobile Strategy - Access to Mobile News

Most publishers have already discovered that it's not enough to make their content available for mobile devices. They know that as long as the costs to access mobile content are too high or not calculable, the percentage of users accessing mobile content will be single digit.

The new media division of Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (WAZ), Essen, Germany, recently launched wirmobil.de in cooperation with the mobile service provider e-plus⁺.

Subscribers of the newspapers of the WAZ Group will receive a special offer for mobile rates. WAZ obviously wants to encourage their offline and online readers to access the mobile portals of DerWesten, newsclick and thüringen1 without the hassle of mobile rates. The strategy aims to foster the mobile community and to prepare for the growing new mobile market by lowering barriers to access. The special rate is only valid for the mentioned target group and mobile portals. With the current market offering WAZ allows their readers to access sports and general news of the region for free as long as no other costs apply (paid content areas). 

Eric Schmid - Newspapers or Journalists? A Matter of Trust.

In previous articles I already stated that I strongly believe that News3.0 will develop towards a branded network of journalists. The interview of Danny Sullivan's with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt about the Google - newspapers controversy is just further fuel for my News3.0 engine. But let us first listen to one of the paragraphs of this interview. (Thanks Danny! - it's really worth reading it)

Danny Sullivan (searchengineland.com): "... Is it just newspapers that have the important brands that people recognize as trusted sources, when it comes to journalism? -

[Eric Schmidt:] There are two different views. There are two different views even within Google. So one view goes like this: The institution becomes less important but the writer remains as important. So that’s sort of the new view.

I don’t happen to agree with this, but I want to make sure I report it accurately. And the rough argument goes like this: Newspapers existed because you needed an aggregation point of great talent. But you really go to a newspaper to read the writers. And because they have so many other outlets, they will become more like freelancers in this model. They will be paid by institutions and they’ll make enough money to get through the day and people will follow them. And some writers will become so famous that they’ll be like basketball stars – they’ll have large salaries and speaking [and] book deals and things like that, although the majority won’t get there.

I disagree with that view, because I believe that there is a value to the brand of the aggregator as well as this trust issue that I was discussing earlier that ultimately a freelance reporter, that ultimately it would be difficult for freelance reporters, as much as we favor them, to operate without at least some institutions of trust. And trust in two ways: trust to the reader, and trust to the sources. ..."

First Schmidt is talking about a freelance model, where newspapers like institutions still exist, and where journalists will not focus on one but on many "outlets" to distribute their content. Journalists will hop from one institution to another to make their living. Second he also refers to the power of a "brand of the aggregator" as a trust center. Now we're at the very core of the subject: it is trust, which differentiates both models.

News3.0 will nurture the seed of trust, since that is the base for journalism anyway. But the mechanism to build trust will be completely different. News3.0 will much more focus on the journalist in the center of the news production process and as part of a network of peers which will be responsible for the overall quality assurance as part of the publishing process.