A Response!
Ryan Thornburg responded to the question I posed earlier about Facebook/MySpace becoming future centers of personalized news feeds. Thornburg rewrote my question into something a little easier to analyze: "Should news sites be focused on creating content or creating user tools?"Most news sites focus on creating content, according to Thornburg, and few of them ever went the way of Yahoo - that is, creating a portal where users had access to a vast array of Internet tools which they could use to obtain and collect information.
"[Portals like Yahoo] have become content aggregator. In fact, they've become so big that most news organizations they deal with give away their content for free to Yahoo in hopes that they will get 1 or 2% clickbacks to their site," said Thornburg.
Online news has become more similar to television than newspapers in their structural model, according to Thornburg. Newspapers are used to creating the content as well as providing delivery and aggregation, but online there is a computer that users must buy as well as access.
"It's going to have to be a pretty piece of content that will entice users to pay yet another fee," Thornburg said.
Thornburg tied it all together by posing one final question:
"Well, let's say that Facebook is the aggregator where folks collect news from a bunch of different content providers. Would you be more likely to pay for the tools of MySpace/Facebook, or for the content from ESPN, Washington Post, MTV, etc.?"
"The answer to that question will tell you who will be driving the future of journalism."
Any thoughts?
posted by tromano @ 9:52 PM
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