The Switch interview of Rob Malda is fascinating. If you have not read it yet – then stop reading here – and follow the link. No seriously. Read it. Don’t skim it. Read it.
The take-away messages are the need for websites to provide insights, the importance of the individual providing the insights, and the charter of WaPo Labs to focus on the future of news. You might find other topics interesting but those are the three which fascinated me.
Aggregation sites have little value. While sites like HuffingtonPost originated as a linking news blog, they hired writers and started creating unique content. This new direction allowed the site to move past aggregation into reporting news. In fact, from Slashdot to Reddit to Hacker News – the same stories are now plastered and shared across social networks. The aggregation is now done by the individual building their own paper.li style of site. it is plain to see that aggregation sites are no longer needed.
Sites like What Is New focused on computer components in the 90s then switched to the Tablet PC ecosystem. Lately we’ve seen the shift to the use of brand-less devices – instead focused on Windows -based devices, Linux-based devices, and iOS-based devices. People are no longer interested in a brand but what the device actually does to improve life.
The insight, therefore, for the future of news is how the news of new devices will enhance life. Will the control of a heart by a computer change lives? Will holographic images be manipulated like in the movie Minority Report? Will we see production of implants controlling body parts – helping the blind see, helping those without legs walk, helping the hearing impaired listen to music?
We are in a new era of website development, specifically the requirement for providing insights into the future of technology beyond opinions of how the hardware functions but whether or not the hardware will improve life. The future of news sites will depend on the aggregated insights of the consumer – and the use of these opinions to drive the news shared on larger sites – as well as the need to filter the volume of share opinions so that the whole day is not spent reading news sites, RSS feeds, twitter, Facebook, and dozens of other aggregation sites.
As I understand Rob Malda, he's interested in the technologies that drive news events rather than the policies that drive them, because he cannot affect those policies, no matter how much he distrusts the people who implement them. He sees those interested in technologies as distrustful, perhaps he meant skeptical, of authority. His skepticism seems healthy and consistent with the history of liberalism since the Renaissance, the opposite of the so called Political Left which is really traditional Power to the King!
As for the future of news, I'm baffled. Since, as news writers have told me and said elsewhere, news is whatever we say is news, what's changing except that more people are writing and posting on the Internet what they consider worth posting? That seems like narcissism and opinionating replacing the reporting of facts. It's the reporting of the alleged fact that Manning and Snowden revealed secret documents that made them a mainstream news story, not the number of opinions of readers of those stories on mobile devices under government spying cameras.
Perhaps Malda's point is, how can we use communication technologies to assemble and distribute more facts as news stories?