Out With A Bang

Two different stories on the MediaGuardian website; two very different takes on this new media world of ours…

One is Alan Rusbridger’s thoughts ahead of the Society Of Editors gathering in Bristol today – an event that could have all the joyous trappings of a particularly miserable wake…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/10/newspapers-the-future-alan-rusbridger

The other is Jemima Kiss’ report on how one of the biggest winners of the US election was new media – in all her many-headed forms… It was the web wot won it…

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/10/obama-online-strategy

Put together and they make for an interesting read.

Rusbridger’s call for a spot of top-slicing-cum-state-subsidy to head the way of the provincial newspaper industry is interesting; I’m not sure how the good tax-payers of Brighton would view the prospect of propping up the ailing US publishing giant Gannett via the Argus and NewsQuest.

But it is a block we’ve been round before following the early day motion of Colchester MP, Bob Russell.

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=114

Now whether by some sleight of regulatory hand, OfCom could persuade the BBC, C4 and the local newspaper industry to bury the hatchet and link, link, link if it meant a top slice of licence fee funding is open to question.

In fairness to Rusbridger, he is right to salute Channel Four’s bold decision to put their money where their mouth is and go looking for new solutions via their 4iP initiative [Declaration of interest: We've got a pilot project lodged with 4iP as we speak...]

Is funding a new print press tower any way forward? Or would any proposed subsidy be based on digital-only, not-for-profit strictures?

I can fully appreciate and recognise the need to keep a 60-plus generation informed of their local goings-on; for them, the local paper remains a central font of their every-day knowledge. But even there, the landscape is slipping. My 76-year-old mother downloads off the i-Player.

And how many corner shops are left to underpin the distribution model needed to keep an 80-year-old in local newspapers?

But the fascinating line that takes us right into the heart of Ms Kiss’ argument comes towards the end…�

‘As they gather in Bristol the country’s local newspapers are feeling acute pain, with some of them facing an existential threat. Communities need information; local politicians and officials need challenge; citizens need a voice…’ writes her boss.

Communities certainly need information; local politicians and officials certainly need challenge… but ‘citizens need a voice…’?

Surely if there is a lesson from Ms Kiss’ article on Obama’s night of triumph, it is that citizens have got a voice, thank you very much.

Their own.

The web has already given them a say; given them an unprecedented chance to be heard. And in being heard, they can then – as mass communities of passionate niches – engineer change way, way beyond what they may ever have hoped to achieve via the letters page of the Beccles & Bungay Journal.

‘Obama’s campaign team is everywhere online: YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Twitter and Facebook, whose co-founder Chris Hughes worked for the campaign from early last year. They mobilised supporters and organised communities, registering 1.5 million volunteers through myBarackObama.com and raising $600m from 3 million people…

On the back of those sort of numbers, it is hard to deny Jemima’s claim that it was the web wot won it.

Accept that and those same citizens that are, apparently, still looking to a local newspaper for a voice have just elected the most powerful man on the planet.

They’re organised; they’re vocal and they’re already out there – harnessing the power of community to out-fox, out-wit and out-perform such old media giants as both our own BBC and Fox News…

‘Fox News did better [than the BBC], calling more wins first than any other broadcaster – 16 according to PoliticsHome. Three blogs – the Unapologetic Mexican, Pandagon and Blue Indiana – all correctly predicted 19 out of 20 results for the key battle states…

Are these people really in need of a local newspaper? Are they really that uninformed without one?

No. They’ve moved on. Whilst we fiddle and watch old media burn, what was once our audience has gone; left the building. Never to return.

They don’t need a local newspaper; they’ve built their own.

What they need above all else is a revenue model that funds and rewards their DIY initiatives; that keeps them in pocket money as their early publishing efforts start to take root – and they need a few network principles; the ability to re-organise themselves into a more elegant and efficient system in which an individual’s single efforts can be harnessed into the advertising pulling power of a whole; where the one can become many… where ‘news’, in whichever guise it arrives, can be simply syndicated through the new eco-system of the web.

Yes, an older generation still needs a voice; their need to be informed has to be recognised.

Thereafter, however, and the punters have already found a voice that befits the 21st Century.

And it ain’t ours.

It’s theirs.

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