subject: The tide of change is sweeping across the print media's shores. Are they doomed? [print this page] The tide of change is sweeping across the print media's shores. Are they doomed?
Aggregation, in its simplest form is indexing news headlines and presenting them for consumers to read through. In the old days, this was a preserve of desktop news readers that consumers would obtain from the net and load RSS links to consume.
How quickly things change in today's world
With the ever increasing move away from desktop-based data consumption to a more web-based system, more and more people are hitting the uninstall button on their newsreader software! Subsequently, they are switching to web based services like Google news and other systems that crawl the web 24 hours day every day, constantly accumulating news, images, video clips and other media meant for presentation on a central platform.IN recent years, of course, as a backlash, the print media has tried to get in on the game by moving its operations to the internet to counter the growing attractiveness of aggregators... not an uncomplicated job in view of the fact that aggregators have the benefit of having multiple headlines from various sources..meaning the user has a virtual one-stop shop for reports and current affairs updates.
Enter the iPhone and the iPad
As if there weren't enough problems for the print media and desktop softwareSteve Jobs decided to add to the heap and introduced the iPhone and iPad, and now, not only can current affairs headlines be accessed online by means of laptop as well as PCanyone with an iPhone, and in fact, any web-enabled cell phone can read the latest items on the go!In the foreseeable future, this writer can see news being delivered to glasses, eyeglasses, maybe even in 3-D! Or delivered to watches in a continuous flow, possibly with geo-targeted news. Which actually brings to mind Twitter.
That new kid on the block has pretty much turned the industry on its head. Now people, themselves, make the news and distribute and share in the supreme newsreader: live updates..as they transpire. If the past is anything to go by, twitter will grow and grow, and if the winds of change continue blowing in its favor, we may just see the new model for information dissemination: decentralized, public and free.
Where will Google and the print media be then? Food for thought indeed
