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The Big Blow: The New Pecking Order of
Content Looms Large in Katrina's Wake |
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6 September 2005 |
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Cataclysmic events such as Hurricane Katrina do not create
trends in content, but they do help to forge into harder
forms trends that were already forming. In the wake of this
natural and human disaster Web content has emerged as the
definitive focus for people needed both fast-breaking
general news and very personal news on events and locations
impacted by powerful events. Traditional outlets that once
leaned tentatively on user-generated media discovered that
combining personal content with their professional product
can point the way to both hard facts and a sense of
community that is impossible to replicate with just a
polished professional product. The raw, the cooked and the
cooking are all required to provide today's definitive
picture of unfolding events to the satisfaction of
sophisticated content users. |
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The events
of this past week's encounter with Hurricane Katrina in the
Gulf Coast states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi have
been profound in the scope of their human tragedy. How do we
know this? The focus of this natural and human disaster in a
relatively narrow geographic zone of the world's most
media-frenzied country has unleashed some of the
most intensive competition for event coverage ever seen. While
the scope of tragedy in southeast Asia's tsunami aftermath
earlier this year was far larger in overall scale and the
events of 9/11 possibly more searing and frightening, the five
"W's" of journalism - who, what, when, where and why - found a
perfect storm of natural disaster, human interest and politics
to test out who was "king of all media" in embracing these
events. So at the end of the day, who was the winner of this
week's media sweepstakes?
Hands down it was the Web that walked
away with the coverage crown. Television's visual impact was
not to be denied, but much of its footage was being consumed
online. Media sites bristled with fast-breaking video clips,
satellite photos and quickly improvised services that
pinpointed the facts far faster than government officials could
gather them for media consumption. Weblogs and widely
circulated emails pointed the way to
key events in real-time. The most remarkable aspect of this
coverage was the confluence of personal and professional media.
Weblogs and online community forums, including those of
nola.com,
the online presence of New Orleans' The Times-Picayune
newspaper, provided widely read and noted commentaries on
events that allowed people to obtain raw facts and observations
from all angles. The
scipionus.com Web site used the interface to Google Maps to
help people post reports on conditions and needs at specific
points. Google itself posted an updated satellite photo of New
Orleans to help people map conditions at
specific locations. Put simply, the facts in the
hands of individual content consumers and producers were coming
from everywhere to everyone, mostly without spin or packaging.
No small wonder, then, that reporters caught up in the
overwhelming events let their hair down and
asked hard questions: the hard facts already were being
aggregated and absorbed by their audiences faster than they
could dish them out.
At Shore we talk oftentimes about ContentNation, the fabric
of individuals and institutions consuming and publishing
content that creates communal awareness and valuable
interchanges far more quickly and effectively than ever before.
In the events unfolding in the wake of Hurricane Katrina we see
the most compelling example to date of the power of a
ContentNation fueled by its ability to consume and create
content with no practical limit. The events what we've been
witnessing will fade into some form of normalcy over time, but
there are some lessons that are likely to linger:
- The center of the "fact economy" has shifted. We
still have a high reliance on professional sources of
content, to be sure: webloggers do not finance weather
satellites, data-gathering flights into the eye of a storm or
other high-ticket investments in fact-gathering. But when an
when an amateur weather buff can
set the Web alight with evacuation warnings
four days before a hurricane hits you know that that facts are not being disseminated the
way that they used to be. Authoritative statements from
authoritative sources still have value, but we've come to a
place where facts that speak for themselves are given from
one peer to another without filtering or packaging on a
regular basis.
- User-generated media is no longer a standalone
phenomenon. Major content services have long doodled with
integrating user comments and other user-generated materials
into their services, usually in highly controlled
experiments. Sometimes, as with
the L.A. Times' failed experiment with wiki-shaped editorial
pages, a loosely managed
approach to user media can conflict with traditional
media goals. But the importance of Nola.com's aggressive use
of user-generated forums and disaster-driven classifieds
seems to point to a more permanent and complementary
relationship unfolding between user content and
professionally published content. Crises can push together
forces who would not normally cooperate with one another in
ways that they may discover are more than temporary in their
benefit.
- Content services are shaped by events as much as they
shape events. Content publishers and producers have pride
themselves in being able to get their hands around events and
encapsulate them in a familiar format for their audiences.
Yet traumatic events oftentimes forge the strength and
importance of new ways of communicating to people that are
outside traditional packaging, forced to prominence when
those traditional packages fail to convey the scope and truth
of events. Television news in the U.S. came into its own in
the wake of the assassination of President Kennedy, cable
news in the Gulf War, each time demonstrating the capability
to encompass events better than older formats and methods.
Web-based news seems to have demonstrated such a tipping
point in Katrina's wake, providing a diversity of views,
contexts and outlets and the ability to assemble content from
any and all sources quickly and effectively in ways that
traditional outlets move too slowly to capture.
In all of this there is good news for professional
publishers and producers of content. The scope of fast-breaking
events can leave an audience struggling to understand where to
turn to for authoritative coverage, drawing audiences to
familiar brands to fill their content needs. But as shown in
these events what people expect once they get to those
"watering holes" is much more diverse than products previously
packaged by professional content producers. A mix of the raw,
the cooked and the cooking has become the standard fare for
content consumers in the know, who are increasingly willing to
sort out fact from fiction themselves via trusted
docents using weblogs and other easily generated media as
guides to the day's events and opinions - even as they
contribute to the news flow themselves via those same tools.
Who would have thought that nature's random blow would create
such a definitive blow for
The New Aggregation.
-
John Blossom
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