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"The continued personalization of news is wonderful in many ways, but it's also problematic," says Sreenath Sreenivasan, professor of new media at Columbia University. "Old-fashioned newspapers always give you some things you want to know, plus some things you should know. The serendipity of that can't be repeated with a too-finely-personalized news source. Any personalization tools must be able to break in and tell you things you need to know. Right now we have the crawl, which I think is overdone, but there will have to be some device to allow important information to get through."
Part of the personalization of news and information, says Sreenivasan, will be consumers' increased interaction with the news.
"More and more, readers are expecting that their opinion counts. They want to be part of the dialogue. Look at the blogs. That's one way people are participating in the information exchange. If journalists are smart, they will use that content to add to their knowledge base."
Consumers Report
Already, some news organizations are using reports from such ad hoc correspondents. According to a Poynter Institute newsletter, the BBC put out a call over the Internet to confirm reports of fighting in Damascus, a location where they had no official correspondents at the time. Within a short time, the network was listing reports from five different people detailing what was happening. "What you want for the future is BBC-level fact-checking, with a large number of bloggers contributing information," says Masiclat. "The thing that will create the BBC 'brand' is quality control or fact-checking. The fundamental human need is for certainty. That's the point at which these things will coalesce. The larger media companies will have to prove they brought their standards to bear on the information collected from a large number of smaller information sources."
Jon Friedman, media editor for CBS MarketWatch.com, says blogs will continue to proliferate, giving voice to ever more nuanced content. He isn't sure most of them will rise past simple entertainment value, but he is convinced the Internet will carry large media companies into the future.
"Overall, the Internet will be a very, very important player, much more so than it is today," says Friedman. "Media companies will find unexpected ways to make money through technical advances that we can't even imagine today."
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