This week's lecture was all about web news and what they mean for the survival of conventional news sources. First of all, we talked about a few web iterations:
-"Old Media" referring to conventional media like newspapers, TV etc.
-Web 1.0: the information web; advertising friendly
-Web 2.0: "New Media", meaning social networks; a focus on social groups and coining the term of Prod-Users
-Web 3.0: the semantic web which is about making sense of information and metatagging; it aims to solve multi-layered questions
Web 3.0 has important implication for news journalism. It allows consumers to tailor the news they receive in order to only read/view the things they might find interesting. While this seems like a good development for the consumer it also means that people will be less likely to read/watch general news which might lead to ignorance and a general lack of knowledge.
When talking about web news, it is vital to consider the phenomenon of entitlement, which we were introduced to through a very effective jelly beans experiment. Consumers have been getting free access to online news for a long time now - it would seem absurd to them to actually pay for something, that they perceive to be rightfully theirs. In that sense, one might call entitlement "the death of journalism": if no one is ready to pay for quality journalism anymore, it will eventually die.
Thus we spent the rest of the lesson talking about how to get people to pay for online news - subscription models and value-added-strategies were mentioned as well as new possibilities for hyperlocal advertising.
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