Radical rethinking
Column: The daily information menu should be shaped not by the narrow focus of specialists, but by the open and curious perspective of ordinary people.
Column The daily information menu should not be dominated by the specialists' tube view, but by people's open and curious view. Last year it was blogs, this year Second Life is the fashion item of the season. We wear imagination and park our brand in the virtual world. Once again, we are self-tormenting with depressing future scenarios concerning the print media and daily newspapers in particular. These are also available cheaply in the countless blogs of (often underemployed) media journalists. One vision by Sven Wagenhöfer (on the much-noticed site www.netzausfall.de) caught the eye: "All news is now only edited thematically by a large editorial team at their discretion, the rest is done by the computer. The news of the future will be written from text modules, linked information such as personal experiences and blogs from all over the world as well as websites. Web services continue to link up and create synergy effects. Algorithms create individualized news for each user based on their personality and user profiles. The end result is the information overdose, the news completely out of the retort."
A brief and heretical thought: And if that were the case - what would actually be so bad about it? Are we fixated on one distribution method (printing) and therefore, strictly speaking, part of the woodworking industry? Or is our core business not rather the collecting, organizing, refining and formatting of content to meet specific customer requirements, regardless of the media used?
A new trend is indeed emerging here, which of course requires not only a further fundamental change in the market - such as an additional boost in mobility - but also a radical rethink on the part of the leading information providers (publishers). If one day they no longer see themselves as exclusive providers of a closed information menu called a newspaper, but rather as a la carte chefs at an information buffet, the visions presented by visionaries such as the Swiss media consultant Heinz Ruesch at the Dreikönigstagung 2006 could come true.
It could go something like this: The mobile information consumer puts together his daily menu according to his individual needs and preferences: world politics from the New York Times, local news from the Zürichsee-Zeitung, the business section from the NZZ, sports news from Blick. He also subscribes to hunting or diving news from around the world from specialist providers because he is a hunter or scuba diver, and temporarily connects to a Berlin university portal because his daughter is studying there. For this individual media menu, the user pays an individual price based on the usefulness of the information to a platform that functions like a transport association or Telekurs and distributes the revenue to the various information providers according to their performance contributions.
The selective search mode replaces indiscriminate scanning. Purposeful behavior takes the place of free roaming. People are no longer driven by the elementary desire for novelty, but by what is dictated to them by their daily program: the flight schedule, the train to the airport, the telephone number from www.telsearch.ch. What is lost in this scenario is the "Gesamtkunstwerk" of the newspaper and its cultural-historical appeal of the unexpected and supposedly unnecessary. By introducing readers to topics that they were neither looking for nor expecting, the newspaper in its current form opens up new horizons and unexpected but exciting cultural or social contexts.
The selection of the daily information menu is not determined by the specialist's tube view, but by the old, perhaps romantic model of the curious, freewheeling spirit of discovery. This does not simply address the specialist and the consumer - e.g. as an investor, weather-dependent sportsman or researching clerk - who is eager for immediately useful factual information, but the culturally open mind, the citizen with a wide range of interests, the educated and curious person. Perhaps it really is an outdated utopia, but perhaps it is the great opportunity for the future of the newspaper as a cultural model in the 21st century and beyond.
Karl Lüönd is a freelance journalist and author. "Verleger sein - Öffentliches Nachdenken über Menschen und Märkte" (Huber, Frauenfeld) will be published at the end of April.
A brief and heretical thought: And if that were the case - what would actually be so bad about it? Are we fixated on one distribution method (printing) and therefore, strictly speaking, part of the woodworking industry? Or is our core business not rather the collecting, organizing, refining and formatting of content to meet specific customer requirements, regardless of the media used?
A new trend is indeed emerging here, which of course requires not only a further fundamental change in the market - such as an additional boost in mobility - but also a radical rethink on the part of the leading information providers (publishers). If one day they no longer see themselves as exclusive providers of a closed information menu called a newspaper, but rather as a la carte chefs at an information buffet, the visions presented by visionaries such as the Swiss media consultant Heinz Ruesch at the Dreikönigstagung 2006 could come true.
It could go something like this: The mobile information consumer puts together his daily menu according to his individual needs and preferences: world politics from the New York Times, local news from the Zürichsee-Zeitung, the business section from the NZZ, sports news from Blick. He also subscribes to hunting or diving news from around the world from specialist providers because he is a hunter or scuba diver, and temporarily connects to a Berlin university portal because his daughter is studying there. For this individual media menu, the user pays an individual price based on the usefulness of the information to a platform that functions like a transport association or Telekurs and distributes the revenue to the various information providers according to their performance contributions.
The selective search mode replaces indiscriminate scanning. Purposeful behavior takes the place of free roaming. People are no longer driven by the elementary desire for novelty, but by what is dictated to them by their daily program: the flight schedule, the train to the airport, the telephone number from www.telsearch.ch. What is lost in this scenario is the "Gesamtkunstwerk" of the newspaper and its cultural-historical appeal of the unexpected and supposedly unnecessary. By introducing readers to topics that they were neither looking for nor expecting, the newspaper in its current form opens up new horizons and unexpected but exciting cultural or social contexts.
The selection of the daily information menu is not determined by the specialist's tube view, but by the old, perhaps romantic model of the curious, freewheeling spirit of discovery. This does not simply address the specialist and the consumer - e.g. as an investor, weather-dependent sportsman or researching clerk - who is eager for immediately useful factual information, but the culturally open mind, the citizen with a wide range of interests, the educated and curious person. Perhaps it really is an outdated utopia, but perhaps it is the great opportunity for the future of the newspaper as a cultural model in the 21st century and beyond.
Karl Lüönd is a freelance journalist and author. "Verleger sein - Öffentliches Nachdenken über Menschen und Märkte" (Huber, Frauenfeld) will be published at the end of April.
