Lots of chatter yesterday, again, about The Future, some of it precipitated by the bankruptcy filing of Sun-Times Media Group. I wound up being one of the chatterers, on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight.
Regrettably, I didn’t get to use my fun fact of the day: that the 5th and 6th largest unsecured creditors of STMG are Sun-Times readers – past winners of a million-dollar sweepstakes that bestowed upon the winners $40,000 a year for 25 years. One is owed $480,000, the other $440,000; both are women in their 70’s. Whoda thunk it.
More to the point, some of my chatter was informed by a great graduate class earlier in the day at Northwestern, taught by Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum of the NU Intelligent Information Lab and Rich Gordon and Jeremy Gilbert of Medill. A joint offering of Medill and the computer science department, it is bringing together developers and journalists to build potential real-world solutions for the news, audience, and economic conundrums that seem to be confounding everyone.
Some of the discussion points among these highly engaged students and faculty were in sync with the points in this interesting, thoughtful blog post that flowed through my Twitterstream earlier in the day. It’s by Daniel Conover, a South Carolina “writer/cartoonist/reporter/videographer/blogger,” and it’s worth a spin as we all march off toward whatever The Future looks like today.
“The No. 1 issue in modern communication is the superhuman rate of expansion in global information production. Mainstream media in 2009 attempt to deal with this problem by artificially limiting the “meaningful” sources of information and then applying “news judgment” to that limited stream. The engineering trick for journalism will be to create systems that scale the true global flow of data to levels that can be used comfortably by humans. This will be accomplished through information architecture, informatics, artificial intelligence, exotic findability structures, taxonomy/folksonomy systems, smart archival and curation techniques, plus multiple reputational and credibility scoring systems.”
via Xark!: 2020 vision: What’s next for news.
It’s a shame that these elderly winners didn’t cash out their winnings – there were probably lots of finance companies who would have been willing to do it.
It looks like “curation” is shaping up to be the media buzzword of 2009 – you’re right that doing it correctly isn’t possible to do by hand anymore and requires Web-scale curation technology. My company, OneSpot has one platform – I’m sure there will (eventually) be others….