This week AP urged/forced bloggers to use ‘guidelines‘ set by AP when quoting articles. As you might expect this instantly burned all AP’s credits in the blogosphere.

Why?
Why? Why would AP be afraid about people copying parts of their articles and linking back? Haven’t we passed this station with newspapers before?

I think there might be a more structural problem for press agencies. Their customers are changing. Most of these agencies are created by newspapers. Combine journalism efforts and save money. But the web is famous for taking out the middle man. In this case the news websites.

Agencies like AP, Reuters and AFP are they source of news. The speed of publishing and access to information that we as consumers demand can do perfectly without a middle man. Press agency news is no longer an article that gives a journalist information to start writing his or her version. What a press agency publishes is the definite version.

Just take an AP headline and Google it.

What’s the problem?
What’s the real problem? Is AP afraid paying customers (news media) will start complaining because they (the agencies) are taking over the online conversation.

Press agencies are the source. And in a web where information is free to move and to be duplicated the source is the most important place.

What’s the future for press agencies? This question is equally important as the question about what the future of newspapers is. In todays news landscape press agencies are leading. Is their future (partly) in serving customers directly? Press agencies are facing changes, but what will be their new business model?

Image found on this forum by Jonny Crossbones

Everyday I commute to work. I can choose to go by car which gives me freedom, loud music, open windows, traffic jams and parking problems. Or I can go by train which gives me time to read books, make this blog post, do some work, have my neighbor sit annoyingly on my lap and hate the smell of my fellow commuters in the morning.

I like both :)

Two ideas
I’m not a traffic expert by any means, I’m just an end-user. Driving to work this week made me think about a few things. Just some ideas that may be already out there (I think so), and maybe they are not. I don’t know about them, since I’m not an expert in this field. Please let me know in the comments if this is.

First I passed a police car doing speed control using the latest laser equipment. I think speed control can be good and is necessary to maintain safety in some places.

In the Netherlands we are kind of overdoing it since it is a pretty solid cash flow. The police checks day and night on the most obscures highways. It doesn’t matter if you’re the only car driving there and the weather is perfect. The system is not flexible in any way. If you’re driving too fast you get ticketed.

Photo Creative Commons, TomTom by Argosnet Photoshopped by me.

This made me think about the TomTom navigator. These devices are very popular. It would be nice if I could tap the screen when I spot a speed control. If more drivers would do this the information would be more reliable. Or drivers could also tap the screen if speed control has moved. Because it knows where the car is it can directly distribute this information to other cars around.

This would not only be great service to the users of a navigator, it would also make them use the navigator more frequently, since people probably aren’t using it driving to work.

In the image above
1) A speed control point is visible
2) Tap the screen and direction the speed control is checking. This information is automatically distributed to other cars and can warn a driver if he or she drives too fast.

Then driving along I ended up in a traffic jam. Every time there is the same traffic jam at the same spot. Most of the time it gets worse because people are changing lanes at the wrong time.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could use LED lights to lighten up the stripes on the road and turn these into a solid line when necessary. LED lights are relatively cheap (at least cheaper for an economy than daily traffic jams) and a strong visual barrier should stop people from changing lanes.

Photo Creative Commons, German Highway by Elmada Photoshopped by me.

Go! and connect to your users
These are just some thoughts. I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking about these things. There are so many people using services every day and they have good ideas, but do not share these ideas.

Not all of these ideas are good, possible to implement or original. But the tools are around to easily connect to the people using your service and use the knowledge your users have.

The ideas are out there, the tools are out there. Just find your way to connect.

The web is becoming a more live medium, the medium itself isn’t changing it is how we publish to it. I think the ‘live web’ is the most exiting development since the rise of social networks. You write a Twitter notification on your mobile phone, post a picture to the web or stream a live video with Qik or Seesmic. Often recording is publishing.

When you write a blog or create a podcast your entry has context in itself. It has a start and it ends. Most postings on micro blogs don’t have context in the messages. The context is in the stream or in time. For example Twitter messages often make sense in your personal timeline or in the conversation within your personal network.

Twitter and Qik are just the first services. Realtime platform independent micro services, that distribute contextless fragments of information are here to stay.

This sense of a ‘live medium’ is something that is changing the web as it is and how we use it. It will change search, or at least sorting search results and it will change reporting news.

A service like Twitter makes news travel fast. This makes it the #1 breaking news source for a lot of people. Why? Because it is reporting as it is happening. It isn’t always right, but it is reporting, open for conversation and correcting itself. It is live coverage and it is a storytelling experience.

News on the web is presented like news on paper. This is good since text on the web is – apart from certain screen specific style rules – the same as on paper. An article is written, checked and published.

Spreading the news
These services like Twitter are making reporting news a more public process. For example if something happens the first people who notice are there when it happens. Uploading messages, pictures and video, to a personal community or group of friends.

With Twitter people start repeating (or retweeting) messages distributing the news among followers and informing a very large audience within minutes. This is the signaling part. It’s not about being a citizen journalist. It is about telling your friends what you are doing, or what you are seeing.

The signal reaches the audience at the same time it reaches the journalist. A journalist has to check the story, is it true? Should I publish about this or wait until it is checked? The reader is expecting that his favorite news website knows more about it and visits the website after hearing about the news. Often resulting in a bad user experience, since there is nothing on the news website about the subject.

What is the role of journalists and media in this? Should they directly report serious rumors? Should they check for more sources. I don’t know. It has to be somewhere in the middle I think. A situation where journalists are producing with updated versions.

CNN
I think CNN is giving this a very prominent place on the CNN website. Maybe because they are from television and reporting breaking news is what they are good at. They are using storytelling mechanisms on the website. Reporting what is happening right now, and directly updating it when the story turns out to be something different.

These are the breaking news messages CNN showed last week. I heard the news about Hillary ending her campaign through Twitter and CNN was one of the few news websites with the news on it.

CNN message before

CNN message after

Your thoughts
What are your thoughts about this? When should news be published on a web site and should we adapt the design of news sites to make space for a more storytelling ‘as-it-is-happening’ approach? Or does this make news websites vulnerable for misinforming the audience?

This blog post was published on the Online Journalism Blog