If you look at the media & news landscape today you will discover that news portals are more or less separated from their readers in the off- and online world. Marketing pursues to increase reach. Teams try to boost website rankings on search engine result pages (SERP) organically with search engine optimization. Performance will be measured utilizing highend web statistic tools. To win in the news market you have to grow your brand's digital attractiveness.
Maybe that this old fashioned role model or communication style will be shown in museums as illustration for the pre-NEWS3.0 era in the near future. Maybe it will become part of the curriculum of j-schools when "leasons learned" will be discussed.
But: what's really next?
My prediction: In the upcoming years the interaction of people, visualized by their social graph, will change how news will be distributed tomorrow.
We're in the era of News3.0. While all of the current news sites struggle to survive, a new kind of player will come up, which will reshape news portals as we know them today.
News will no longer be broadcasted to an anonymous mass in the News3.0 era. Instead news will be communicated by members of a community, peer to peer, by people we trust.
The recent figures published by Hitwise (read my last post) are a first indicator of change. Guess: how long will it take until Facebook will start to keep the traffic inside instead of fuelling upstreams to other portal sites?
Another lighthouse from which the impact of social media can be observed is Google Labs at http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html
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