The future of news: You

The Future of News: "You"

Edited From: USA TODAY

 by Mike Ntobi, Author Friends4Ever

It's all about you.

Not readers, not viewers, not listeners, not mobile users. No, it's about you, the consumers of news.

Thirty years ago, you got your news by newspapers, magazines, television and radio. Different journalists provided coverage through different media. We were moving from typewriters to primitive computers, experimenting with transmitting news directly from events on primitive Radio Shack TRS-80 laptops, and clumsy mobile phones the size of milk cartons.

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But then USA TODAY reinvented storytelling and changed how news was produced. We added shorter stories that were straight and to-the-point; full-color photos and charts; and an unprecedented satellite printing strategy that allowed the same newspaper to appear on doorsteps and news racks from Hackensack to Honolulu.

Just as in 1982, now it's time to evolve again. But this time we have to deliver on multiple platforms, from video to interactive graphics to text and photos. In what can only be described as a new "Gutenberg moment," the world of media is exploding. People can get the story anywhere, anytime and on any device.

Thirty years ago, the major media from the previous 30 years hadn't changed: CBS, NBC, ABC, AP, Reuters, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post were the dominant news brands. CNN was just two years old.

Few predicted the Internet or how it would change things. Or that news and media coverage would splinter into dozens of niche brands: ESPN, C-SPAN, Entertainment Tonight, MTV and many more. Or that today we'd be primarily consuming news from all those sources on our phones and tablets.

Our children don't distinguish between TV and radio anymore. Indeed, hundreds of thousands of Americans have given up their household TVs and just watch video on the Web. Newspapers are closing right and left, or switching focus to their websites.

The biggest news brands of 2012, aside from USA TODAY, are CNN, Fox News, Bloomberg News, Yahoo News, and upstarts like The Huffington Post and Politico. None of these, except for a nascent CNN, existed 30 years ago. The Times, Journal, Reuters and Post are all still popular and dominant, but mostly because they've learned to deliver news the way you now want it, digitally.

Your "news feed" on Facebook or your Twitter feeds wouldn't even qualify as news by traditional standards, but those places are where you go for the news you and your friends want.

The game changes every generation. The next 30 years will be no different. Imagine how flexible tablets, flying cars and hologram technology will change delivery. Or the ability to store vast realms of data on DNA, or simply on the Internet in so-called cloud technology. The big news brands will change too, with new players emerging, others fading away and the smartest ones thriving by changing their display, delivery and business models.

You, the user, will be even more closely tied to the news, contributing your thoughts, your photos, your videos and your locations when news breaks. You will make more news than you ever have before.

But brands like USA TODAY will still matter, perhaps more than ever. Even with the fragmentation of news and information online, on phones and tablets and on devices still unimagined, you will migrate to brands you trust for the essentials, be it political opinion, sports, weather, stock advice, celebrity interviews or e-book reviews.

That's why the biggest brands are beginning to look at news not from the point of how it's collected and delivered, but for what it has always been in its most basic form -- telling you something new.

That means breaking news and enterprise, or investigative news, will converge, as you demand unique approaches from your news brands. But on your time frame, not ours.

Even the look of newsrooms will change. A handful of news organizations have begun to assemble desks in the center of their newsrooms -- a revamped "city desk" for a digital age -- to stream news to the burgeoning new forms of media. London's The Daily Telegraph and The Wall Street Journal, for example, have created such desks to focus on online and video as well as print.

At USA TODAY, we're taking it a step further.

We're creating a news desk that combines the journalistic firepower of not only the USA TODAY newsroom but all of the 82 newspapers, 23 TV stations and other news assets of our parent, Gannett Co. Inc., some 5,000 journalists in all. That's a reporting army almost twice the size of what is now Thompson Reuters, which has traditionally billed itself as the world's largest news organization. But numbers aren't enough: The trick is to make them work together.

So we're building a hub-and-spoke news desk where the senior editors from news departments such as video, graphics, breaking news, and enterprise will work together and across platforms to deliver national news, charts and visuals to every local Gannett paper and TV station across the country. Included in the mix will be news flowing across social media, much of it from you, our readers and viewers.

And we'll use the best of what is coming from Gannett papers such as the Detroit Free Press, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and KUSA-TV in Denver, the top-rated TV station in the country, to leverage their scoops and unique reporting across all of our media.

In a world where news is everywhere and moving from the written word to video and audio, where people can actually experience news events in real time, no news organization can rely on past editorial structures and guidelines. The best of what we do -- in terms of reporting, standards and how we interact with you, our readers -- will evolve as the nature of the technology evolves.

This will happen because you will demand it. Even as many news jobs and news organizations cease to exist, victims of old business models, you want more news than ever. New ways to sell and distribute advertising will emerge. Experiments with news by subscription and news on demand will get more creative, to the point where the best pay plans will hardly be noticed by consumers, much like cable TV is today. Only then will these assets really take off.

You need news to succeed today, to enjoy your life and your families and friends, and to make sense of a rapidly changing world. That's one thing that won't be different in 30 years. See you then.