perjantai 5. heinäkuuta 2013

Minding relationship or relationshit

Jeff Jarvis is a great artist. He is a great thinker, too. He is right when he says that the news industry has been too focused on producing content for masses. Now, Jarvis argues, it is time to skip a) the content neurosis, and b) the mass of people.
The news industry, i.e. the journalists, should now understand that they are in the relationship business, where "The Mass" is an insult. Now is the time to serve the "individual" - the way Google does.
Says the man Jarvis, who tries to turn Google in to a religion.
No offence Jeff. But you ARE preaching sometimes...
The method is to start with small data. If Google knows where you live and where you work, though you never told Google that, the new news business should do the same. That way newsmedia should create a realtionship to the consumer.
The rest seems to be easy. When the individual interacts with the news medium, the individual gets rewarded, for example by having a lower pay wall.
This is how I understand Jeff Jarvis.
The news is not dead. It lives a better life now than ever before. We consume fast news more than ever - more often than ever, and more, like a hell of a lot more - on mobile gadgets. This also kills the argument that the form of news, the news triangle, would be gone. The triangle has presented edgy news for a couple of hundred years. And now, more than ever, we are in need of news that hits the consumer's target fast, very fast indeed. We are probably in need of an even sharper news triangle than before.
You see, I don't believe in slow journalism, when it comes to news anymore. Sorry all you people believing in narratives. It is the NEWS that will be the map and the compass for the change in our industry.
So?
You can not (Jarvis does...) state that the conventional way of thinking in terms of content production has not been acting in a relationship manner, too. "It could have been me" is the strongest news criteria. That is taking care of relationship business. Many of these news come from people witnessing something dramatic. That is taking care of relationship business.
Do these sources get any reward from the media?
No.
That is giving a shit about the relationship.
I guess this is why people still wait for the media to surprise them, rather than helping the media surprise the helping individual.
We must stop giving a shit about those who live in the world we are reporting on/from/about/trying to change. Let's for once be humble. IF we journalists still are on the small individual's side.

Jarvis is right when he says that media does not engage anymore. Media does not engage like for example Facebook. It never has, and it never will. Before Facebook, news media was not able to engage even the way a rockfestival did. Still news media set the agenda almost every day, in almost every family, and on almost every work place.
(And I don't think FB will last, and you are not really the one you are on FB. If you are, stop photoing the spaghetti you just cooked...)

Maybe it is time to either stop fuzzing about the journalism being in a paradigm shift, or alternatively fuzz and fuck it all up totally.

If we think that we want to be served personalised news and entertainment, in some kind of relationship with the news industry, we in the industry are supposed to give something back. If we do this, and take the audience into the production line at a very much earlier stage than now - then we truly are heading for a new world, where the journalist - having a monthly salary at a media brand, or being his/hers own brand - is taking care of both the Business.