What comes after news?
Lately I’ve been talking to a lot of people about the idea that news is shrinking in importance—specifically, news produced by traditional media outlets. In fact, I struggle with using the word “news” anymore. Its meaning is lost to me in today’s information landscape.
There are still journalists doing great work in order to report something previously unknown. But there are also everyday people sharing information on all sorts of platforms, some of which is previously unknown. Is that “news”?
Probably not, by the definition of news that we are used to. That definition doesn’t serve us much anymore, though. 25 years ago you’d get your information from trusted sources that had strong distribution and credibility. Now, we consume anywhere and everywhere, from all types of sources and voices.
If the purpose of news used to be to inform us about the world, well, we now have way more information than we know what to do with. Consumers have expressed a clear preference for paying attention to user-generated content rather than legacy media. This has ended up in us drowning in content, some of it resembling the news of yesteryear, but most of it being a newer type of information.
So what comes next?
We’ll harness AI to do work for us, filtering through the nonstop flow of new information and only surfacing what we care about. Great products will encourage us to go down good rabbit holes. We’ll better understand our world because we’ll have tools to process it and the resulting information will be hyper-personalized.
I can't wait.
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