In this post I am going to write a bit about the underlying trends and philosophies that are driving our product development process here at Bee HQ (would that be a Beehive?). For a bit about the history of how I got involved with this project, and the thinking that precedes this, read my post on my personal blog.
Trend One: The Democratization of Publishing
The news cycle has been getting shorter for some time. An interesting and often overlooked statistic is that newspaper circulation peaked in the early 1980s, long before the Internet. While the Internet has accelerated and transformed this trend, the seeds of change had been sown long before.
Perhaps one of the most startling news transformation in my lifetime was the news coverage of the first Gulf war in the early 1990s. Instantaneous television coverage of the war in progress broadcast worldwide brought that conflict directly into every home. The President of the United States watched CNN to find out what was happening on the battlefront.
The Internet has had its own impact, of course. And not just on newspapers but on all types of media. Perhaps the most powerful impact of the Internet as a technology has been the way in which it provides an infrastructure for any reader to become a publisher as well. With its roots as a communication medium, it has always been important for every leaf node of the Internet to have the ability to broadcast as well as receive. Contrast this with traditional media in which there are a small number of broadcasters and a large number of recipients.
In the first few decades of the Internet the capacity to exploit this inherent capability of broadcasting from every leaf node was limited to scientific users, both by design and because the underlying technology was complex. But with the advent of Mosaic, and then Netscape, the democratization of publishing had begun.
Today, anyone with Internet access can create news and information that is instantly accessible to a worldwide audience. In the second Gulf war we have received reports from the battlefield that are not only instantaneous, but are unfiltered and from the widest possible range of perspectives.
Trend Two: Communities of Interest as News Propagators
At the same time that the Internet has made it possible for everyone to become writers and publishers, it has also created the possibility for us to find like-minded people regardless of geography and, increasingly, regardless of language.
News and information becomes a hub for these communities, allowing people to find each other and providing the ongoing lubricant for their interactions. No matter how specific your interests are, you are likely to find some other individuals somewhere on the planet who shares those interests.
In addition to allowing people to find each other, the Internet is increasingly efficient at helping people create ongoing conversations about these interests. This aspect of communications also has an impact on the news cycle in that the propagation of a particular news item is increasingly through these communities and not through traditional media outlet. This community based news dissemination radically challenges those traditional outlets because it changes the way in which we evaluate the sources of information that we are receiving.
Philosophy One: Fractalization
Both trend number one and trend number two exhibit a behavior analogous to the mathematical model of fractalization. Described generally what this means is that large entities can be resolved into smaller entities, ad infinetem. Others have called this "deconstruction," borrowing the term from the school of philosophy (and literary criticism) pioneered by Derrida. But leaving aside a debate about the use and abuse of this set of philosophical ideas, I submit that deconstruction as an English term suggests a taking apart whereas fractalization is a way of looking at the parts of a whole and as a result having the ability to examine something from a variety of perspectives (or degrees of fractalization).
What this means in the context of the news media and the Internet's impact is that it is now possible to examine the business of news production and consumption at the level of its constituent parts, instead of as a monolithic industry. Traditional media outlets can adjust to this new transparency (and they often are). But fractalization also creates a new opportunity for news to be produced and consumed by much more dynamic entities.
Philosophy Two: Efficient Markets
Capitalism has been a remarkably efficient player on the world stage for encouraging quality and productivity. Clearly it has flaws and abuses but to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill on the subject of Democracy, "It's the worst form of economics, except for all the rest." Perhaps it is also worthwhile to paraphrase Jefferson (also on the subject of Democracy), "the price of Capitalism is eternal vigilance."
But the underlying point is that people, given the opportunity, will vote with their feet, dollars, or in the case of news, with their attention. And as a result the best things will tend to be promoted, the worst things disappear. The point about vigilance is crucial, however. One of the key tenets of Democracy is the protection of minority interests and the rule of law. There is a risk in any system that follows the will of the crowd, that the crowd will become tyrannical. Political observers back to Plato have observed that crowds tend to coronate despots.
Thus the behavior of people's attention is important, but not sufficient. We also need intelligent domain experts to put checks and balances on the way in which the crowd behaves. Perhaps instead of editors, we will come to call these people judges.
So what is the Bee?
The Bee is an attempt to represent, in software, the fractalized ecosystem of reading, writing, editing, and publishing -- the production and consumption of the news process. We call our judges beekeepers. We recognize that beekeeping (editing) and writing are different skill sets. Sometimes good writers are also good editors, sometimes not. Sometimes domain experts who are not writers by profession are also good writers and/or good editors.
Part of the philosophy of the bee is to use the logic of the marketplace to ferret out who the good writers and good editors are... at least in the minds of the consumers of their effort, the readers. This process is moderated by human participants and process to help steer away from the risks of tyranny that pure crowd behavior can sometimes introduce.
That having been said, I think that the Bee can provide a very interesting opportunity to members of the traditional media in helping them (if not the publishing organizations they work for) move into a new generation of online media. An infrastructure like the Bee (if not the Bee itself) could help traditional media participate in the fractalization of their industry, taking advantage of the strengths that these entities have developed over time while becoming more dynamic and nimble.
At the same time new media is evolving to fully realize certain latent aspects of traditional media. Letters to the Editor and radio talk show programs are two interesting ways that traditional media has engaged the consumer of information with the producers of information. Online these interactions multiply and expand in interesting ways. Readers (consumers) rebroadcast what they read, becoming producers in the process. Readers can respond directly or indirectly with producers, and the producers can reply in kind. In addition, the methods of distribution of information are fractalizing online, with the result that much smaller (and thus more independent) information outlets, down to a single individual, can operate economically.
My view is that the Bee will amplify these trends and provide an infrastructure for a new ecosystem of news producers, editors, and readers. Traditionally trained media workers can adapt to this new ecosystem and become some of the most successful participants, but they will certainly not be the only successful participants.
While this post has been a very high level exposition of the coming changes and opportunities that we see and hope to participate in, soon the Bee itself will begin to emerge from its cocoon and the ideas above will become a live breathing entity in the world. We hope you'll participate in helping us develop this new world.
