Silicon Insider: The Next Step in Web Media

Sept. 28, 2006 — -- Here, take a look at the future: http://www.ibctoday.com/News/Home.aspx

But be sure to come back or ABC will never let me do a link again.

Now, I don't know how long you hung around there, but I'll bet you spent a while.

Interesting, isn't it? Trust me: it's going to grow a whole lot more interesting the more I tell you about it.

A couple years ago I got into a lot of trouble when I used this column to announce the death of newspapers.

At the time I said that even as a veteran newspaper reporter I had realized that I didn't really read printed news anymore, that it was so much quicker, more efficient, and ultimately more balanced for me to gather my news by hopscotching around trusted news sources on the Web.

My analysis was anecdotal, I admitted, but if a guy who made his living from newspapers didn't read them anymore, why would anybody else?

Well, the reaction was pretty intense. I was accused in trade publications, columns and across the blogosphere of being biased, ignorant and a lousy business reporter -- after all, didn't I know that the newspaper business was still highly profitable?

Newspapers, I was told, usually in a pedantic tone, would be around for generations to come because they were institutions, because they'd already been around for centuries. Besides, what would mornings be like without a cup of coffee and the paper?

My answer to that: "I dunno, ask anybody under 25."

Luckily, Rupert Murdoch came to my rescue a week later when he gave a much-publicized speech that made a similar prediction. Now it wasn't some nobody tech reporter announcing the death of newspapers, but a media mogul.

I could be dismissed, Murdoch could not.

Newspapers Still Make a Contribution

Well, you know the rest of that story.

Indeed, some of the publications that reacted the most strongly to these predictions are now ghosts.

Of my two hometown papers, the ones I used as examples of the superfluousness of newspapers in the Internet age, The San Francisco Chronicle is a dead man walking, and The San Jose Mercury-News was sold off in the general disembowelment of Knight-Ridder.

Yet even as I predicted their demise, there was one characteristic of newspapers that I regretted seeing lost.

This was the ability of newspapers to coalesce disparate story subjects into the monolithic, easily navigable format of the traditional newspaper.

For all of the power of the Web, if we had to perpetually hop around from site to site to gather a wide range of breaking stories and features, we would run the risk of not only not finding the stories we were looking for, but following our biases away from the stories we needed to read to maintain some kind of balance.

In other words, despite their increasingly obvious biases -- which seem to grow worse by the month -- newspapers still have an important contribution to make to readers.

Unlike much of the online media outlets, newspapers force them to assume perspectives they may not agree with.

By the same token, the random juxtaposition of newspaper stories may cause us to read an article we might not normally notice -- much in the same way bookstores can offer us unexpected pleasures that an Amazon.com, which reinforces our current biases, cannot.

The need for a comparable "aggregating" news function on the Web has convinced me for a couple of years now that the void left by the death of newspapers would ultimately drive the creation of comparable sites on the Web.

That is, services that offered this larger aggregating function, transformed by the unique power of the Internet.

Little by little, that is what has happened.

For one thing, traditional media -- at least the smart ones -- have recognized the growing hegemony of the Web and begun to turn their Web sites, once mere appendages, into the centerpiece of their business.

I may not read The San Jose Merc anymore, but I sure visit its SiliconValley.com Web site on a regular basis.

Hardly anyone I know reads Forbes magazine anymore (or Biz Week or Fortune, for that matter), but they've helped to make Forbes.com a financial powerhouse -- to the point that the Web site has become that venerable company's real business.

For that matter, look at this site.

Like most dot-coms, ABCNEWS.com got hammered when the bubble burst.

And yet, if you could revisit this site as it was in 2000, you'd be amazed what a tepid affair it was, little more than an appendage to ABC Network News.

Now look at it.

Will Entrepreneurs Bypass Traditional Media?

But as much as the handful of smart traditional media companies have transformed themselves to meet this new reality, I've long assumed that the real innovations -- the defining models for mass media in the 21st century -- would emerge from entrepreneurs of the Internet itself.

That's why, longtime readers of this column will remember, I cheered the arrival of Pajamas Media, the first real aggregator of the blogosphere.

Pajamas got off to a shaky start -- stumbling just enough to satisfy those who had predicted it to fail but eventually finding its legs.

Now that the mainstream media have moved on to other stories, Pajamas is pulling in hundreds of thousands of readers each day, all drawn to its attractive mix of stories, viewpoints and, increasingly, videos.

Right now, especially on the big international stories, nobody covers events from more perspectives and with greater nuance than Pajamas Media.

And it's not alone.

Out there in the blogosphere, a noisy but unreported revolution is taking place.

Video and podcasting, a novelty a year ago, have now been fully integrated into the blogging experience.

Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin has been a real pioneer here, as has uber-blogger Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds and his wife, Helen Smith.

But increasingly you can go anywhere in the blogosphere, and across the political spectrum -- the Daily Kos is a good example on the left -- and see a whole new vocabulary emerging that mixes links, commentary, streaming video and audio into something very fluid and powerful.

YouTube, that Web video phenomenon, is generally seen as an entertainment site -- you know, for watching old videos of Jimi Hendrix and new videos of guys dumping Mentos into diet Coke bottles.

But something important is going on there as well.

Increasingly, it is becoming the go-to place for videos you heard about, but missed when they first aired -- the Chris Wallace/Bill Clinton interview, the shrieking weatherman with the cockroach, the Terrell Owens news conference, etc.

As with many important breakthroughs in technology, this one is sneaking into our lives in the guise of entertainment: We are becoming fluent in conversing in video.

And now the Internet Broadcast Corporation.

Creating a True, Web-Based Global News Network

I happened to try out an early beta of this service last spring.

Because I used to work with his wife, Camilla, at Oxford University, company founder Tyler Cavell called me up when he was down from his Montreal headquarters meeting with Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

Cavell comes from a leading Canadian publishing family and studied global media at the London School of Economics.

Out of this came a vision for what a true, Web-based global news network should look like.

Back then, Cavell called the service "Mediascrape," which I kind of liked. Now he's renamed it with something more ambitious.

Like a lot of important new tech services -- remember the early days of eBay -- using IBC right now won't knock your socks off.

Rather, it looks kind of like a global newscroll, mostly from predictable wire service sources like The Associated Press and Reuters.

But it is where Mediascrape/IBC is going that is astonishing.

For example, Cavell has now signed up more than a dozen local TV broadcasters in markets around the world -- from Canada to Zambia, Turkey to the Krgyz Republic.

Most right now are in Eastern Europe, which was targeted by IBC because of the large numbers of wealthy immigrants from that region living in North America who wanted to watch the news from home.

But IBC is already in negotiations with 20 more countries and is preparing to target Asia and the United States next.

Already each day, besides scores of print stories, Mediascrape/IBC offers two hours of local broadcast-news clips from around the world, presented both in the original language and translated into English, and updated every 30 minutes.

IBC has even opened a video production facility in Laos, of all places. And the service also accepts user submitted content.

That's just the start. As I write this, IBC is inking a content deal with one of America's two largest 24/7 news networks -- which will instantly make it one of the biggest online news providers on the planet.

IBC's unstated, but obvious, goal is to create a site at which, any time day or night, you and I can call up not only the usual global wire service stories and news video feeds, but also the stories and videos emerging from the place itself.

We won't have to hear the news from Lebanon or Botswana or Thailand chopped up by some managing editor in London or Manhattan, N.Y., but rather, the full footage from those countries' media, and even from everyday citizens.

The Internet Broadcast Corporation, and those that will no doubt follow it, is exactly what the Web was made for.

It fills that void left with the death of newspapers -- and may even help keep a few of them alive in a radically changed form.

It also has all of the elements of one of those great market end-runs that keeps tech so endlessly interesting.

And best of all, assuming you have a laptop and wireless router nearby, you can even read it in the morning with a cup of coffee.

This work is the opinion of the columnist and in no way reflects the opinion of ABC News.

Michael S. Malone, once called the Boswell of Silicon Valley, is one of the nation's best-known technology writers. He has covered Silicon Valley and high-tech for more than 25 years, beginning with the San Jose Mercury News, as the nation's first daily high-tech reporter. His articles and editorials have appeared in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, the Economist and Fortune, and for two years he was a columnist for The New York Times. He was editor of Forbes ASAP, the world's largest-circulation business-tech magazine, at the height of the dot-com boom. Malone is best-known as the author or co-author of a dozen books, notably the best-selling "Virtual Corporation." Malone has also hosted three public television interview series, and most recently co-produced the celebrated PBS miniseries on social entrepreneurs, "The New Heroes." He has been the ABCNEWS.com "Silicon Insider" columnist since 2000.