Interactivity: Citizens As Journalists
The old media deliver the old politics: the insider's game, presented on high, from the elite to the masses. The new technologies break the journalist's monopoly, making some of the new news an unmediated collaboration between the sources and the audience.
As we have seen, citizens can program their computers to retrieve their own
"news," assembled easily from original sources far more diverse than the
journalist's official Rolodex. Newly empowered, they also can second-guess what
professional journalists produce.
According to technology marketing analyst Nicholas Donatiello, people are eager
to control which communications come into their homes and when. They also want
to be "more selective about what segments they want to watch of the
news."The New
York Times.choices.
They will want a quick, efficient way to obtain precisely what they are
looking for, whether it's a trustworthy overview of the world's events, a copy
of Julia Child's lemon mousse recipe, or a conversation with a fellow basset
hound breeder. As media analyst Denise Caruso explains it, "The message of this
new medium is `I want what I want and nothing more.'"
Journalists, if they're smart, will offer continual information guidance that
obviates the need for such robots. To do this, they may not have to be as
entertaining or as ideological as Rush's reports, but they will have to be more
accurate, more relevant, and more attuned to their audiences than most are
today.
The new technologies offer journalists not only the potential perils of
competition and scrutiny but also the potential benefits of an expanded role:
connecting citizens to information and to each other. To succeed, journalists
cannot connect simply for the sake of connecting; they will have to deliver
something of additional value to the customer.
Time Is Infinite
Interactivity is only one of the dramatic technologies now changing the news.
Journalism, already instant and global, can be released by digital technology
from many time and space constraints, offering unlimited opportunities for both
consumers and providers.
Major news archives have been available for years in library clip files, on
microfilm, and in databases like LEXIS/NEXIS. But now they will be easy and
inexpensive for the public to access from their homes, at a moment's notice,
especially if journalists package and resell them to accompany current news.
The incentive is to reuse everything because the news hole has expanded beyond
the current news staff's capacity to fill it.
Thus, time, which is now one of the journalist's greatest foes, will lose its
power to define the news story. If deadlines are fixed as they are now by
arbitrary distribution deadlines, they can force a rush to judgment that erodes
the trustworthiness of the news product. But if deadlines are constant, one can
devote to an enterprise news storyWashington Post editor Bob Woodward calls more "time against the
problem" to improve the product.
Instant scoops on Los Angeles local television stations about evidence that was
being developed for the O.J. Simpson trial generally backfired; there were too
many, too often to identify with a particular purveyor, and they usually were
incorrect. In the multichannel environment, why would a customer deliberately
look for a newscast that rushed to judgment and proved incorrect?
On the other hand, a news organization will need something exclusive to offer
if it is to occupy a distinct niche in the multichannel environment. A news
channel with a trusted anchor will have an advantage in the new marketplace,
and a different kind of exclusive scoop--a research or analysis piece that has
been developed by the news organization alone--will sharpen the purveyor's
competitive edge.
Space Is Endless
In the digital world, journalism is liberated not just from time but
from space constraints. The reporter's dream has come true: now there is a
bottomless news hole, thanks to new technologies and the Internet. Online news
customers become archaeologists; they can start at the surface with the
headline, digest, or summary of the news, and then click on words or pictures
to enter layer upon layer of longer stories, related features, analysis pieces,
and sound and video clips. Finally, they will reach original documents and
discussion groups on an issue.79
Place Is Local
Thanks to satellites and the Internet, the communications media can defy not
only space and time but place. Cable viewers in Washington, D.C., now can see
the latest newscasts from Moscow, New York, and Tokyo, in addition to other
traditional American media, including CNN.
Previous communications technologies made the news more global. Now the new
media also make it more local. Improved access to the rest of the world's news
raises the value of local journalism sent directly from the original location
where the news occurs. It can sell itself to new markets because it has a
unique product that no one else can produce. Remem-ber when all 64 channels
were carrying O.J. Simpson's white Bronco live as it sped along the Los Angeles
Freeway? Most networks were carrying pictures provided by the same few local
television stations in Los Angeles.
The foreign correspondents and international "parachute journalists" who go
from crisis to crisis for CBS and The Washington Post are less valuable
in this new media marketplace. Unless they offer a framework and context that
add value to the raw footage, more foreign bureaus will close as customers seek
to get their news live and fresh from the locals on the scene, the wire
services, and international specialists like CNN and the BBC.
Customized news also becomes local in a different way--rooted locally to a new
geography of "virtual," rather than physical communities. Ironically, as we
reach everyone in the world at once through CNN and the Internet, we respond by
retreating to small virtual communities of specific interest. We turn inward to
smaller groups because, as political writer E.J. Dionne observes, the global
community is "too big to put [our] arms around."
But quality news cannot be designed to win the channel surfing contest. It must
expect instead to be selected, as a special niche that loyal viewers visit for
good reason. Some channels choose all-news formats so that they become the
logical place to go for news.82
At WFAA-TV in Dallas, Producer Walt Zwirko used Microsoft's CD-ROM
encyclopedia, Encarta, for background material on Haiti as the U.S.
military prepared to land there. Highly compressed CD-ROM archives enable
reporters to find phone numbers, street maps and other intimate data for the
nation and the world.
Surveys indicate that this time-shifting and indexing, always available to some
degree with print and now available for television and radio, is attractive to
consumers. It also is a great boon to journalists because it opens up a new
market for recycling material that currently appears once and then vanishes
into the air. Stories in the new digital media are archived so they can be
accessed when consumers actually want to learn about these subjects; material
omitted from the original story also can be packaged and sold. 
More significantly, the hot "scoop" loses its commercial value in this
environment. Scoops are prized by reporters, who rate each other on who gets
the news first. However, the value of the time-sensitive scoop is lost in the
constant news marketplace, except in financial and some other specialty
markets. Even though more and more news stations "burn their brand" into each
video frame to mark their scoops, the news consumer rarely remembers who had a
news item first as she surfs through scores of channels. Furthermore, if the
news truly is a major break-through, it will be picked up in nanoseconds and
carried by hundreds of other news sources.
Thus, the expensive, high-powered network news loses its aura as something
special; instead, it sits on the bench, next to local news, CNN, Fox news,
entertainment news, sports news, and weather news. How will a consumer decide
which to pick? A channel surfer will probably land on the news with the hottest
production values or the most dazzling story of that millisecond. Or viewers
may stop for a while because they see the story being delivered by someone they
like and trust.
