“Every advance in technology has seen the invention of a new form of news. Linotype got us mass circulation of newspapers 125 years ago; television, the network evening news 60 years ago; cable, 24-7 satellite news 25 years ago. So what's Internet news—what's the new news thing,” Wolff asks.

According to Wolff, news as we know it is “technologically obsolete.” Whereas the ‘news model’ has traditionally been prioritized and front-page-driven (important news first), “it should have to do now with falling through something, or floating through the totality of information,” says Patrick Spain, who founded the business information site Hoover.

This notion of a constantly interweaving pattern is certainly more representative of the Web’s possibilities. But, as Wolff notes, the notion itself is based on the assumption that there has to be news as we conceptualize it – collected and categorized by a referent with news judgment (rather than a critical mass of bloggers).

Therefore the paradox: trying to reinvent news in the YouTube paradigm while sticking to its ‘old’ definition. Indeed, most people “interested in news, rather than, say, social networking, or solitary blogging, who believe news media might thrive, online or in more classic forms, are old,” remarks Wolff.

So this doesn’t help to reinvent news to be adapted to this great new innovation, the Internet. Only news aggregators and their owners, which blandly collect news with no emotional sense of hierarchy, have taken advantage of some of the possibilities, although “these are technology guys, not news guys.”

Says Wolff: “In some possibly profound sense, the aggregators are onto something: the issue may not be how do you report news—but why would you want to?”

Then comes Jim Romenesko, who founded Media Gossip in 1999.
“Instead of reporting on the media, Romenesko just picked from what everybody else was reporting.” And this became the news: deciphering patterns in news coverage and identifying the overarching news they pointed to.

So what will news become, and what will the final version of Newser.com be like? Currently in beta version, Newser.com presents self-edited blurbs linking to stories from a multiplicity of mainstream news sources. Wolff doesn’t give any explicit details, but he does seem to hint at this Romenesko-related notion.

“Would it be possible to know what other people think is news? So that—and imagine that I am now gesticulating awkwardly—the news experience is potentially about not just my knowing something but understanding who knows what I know, and of my understanding what they know.”

Is this the beginning of a new meaning for news?

Source: Vanity Fair through Poynter Institute