Working on a new executive summary to describe the Bee to potential investors and found myself writing something more philosophical and appropriate for this blog space... so here you go:
Warren Buffet remarked at an investor meeting that newspapers are a business “in permanent decline.” In a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Rupert Murdoch observed that “…the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from.” By all accounts, the newspaper industry, a $50 billion per year business in the US alone, is at the cusp of an enormous transformation. And the coming changes reach far beyond daily news and into every kind of news publishing enterprise.
“Everybody is a network,” writes Jeff Jarvis, a longtime newspaper editor and now media consultant. He goes on to describe how the centralized news networks are collapsing and a new kind of network is emerging:
“Networks are about sharing now; they used to be about control. Networks are two-way; they used to be one-way. Networks are about aggregation more than distribution; they are about finding and being found. Networks are now open while, by their very definition, they used to be closed. You join networks and leave them at will; you can join any number of networks at once and content can be found via any number of networks, there is no practical limit.
Networks used to be static. Now networks are fluid."
The Internet has fundamentally, radically, changed the economics of information distribution. Certainly the cost of distributing content is dropping to zero, but it is even more important to look at how roles in the information distribution process have been turned upside down. Murdoch summarizes the history of media as a “…highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know.” We are rapidly moving toward a future in which the news we care about comes to us through the social and business networks we participate in. And our reading behavior will in turn inform “editors” (whether human or computer) what we should know.
The Personal Bee is about social media. It is about the coming fractalization of the news media industry, the empowering of social and business networks to become participatory consumers of news content, and about how attention will be aggregated and monetized in this new distributed publishing world.
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