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March 28, 2024

Nieman Reports: "I Am the New Homepage"

The summer, 2010 issue of Nieman Reports is out. Titled, “What’s Next for News?”, it ranges in topic from “the challenges of constant connectivity” to “Radiohead Journalism. Among those represented in its 88 pages include Nick Carr, Juan Antonio Giner, Jack Fuller, Douglas Rushkoff, Brant Houston, Nora Paul, Kathleen Hansen and me.

I chose to focus on social media’s huge impact on and nexus with news, both on reading choices and on the emerging business models of our time. An excerpt from the piece:

“Stated simply: I am the new home page.

Stuff gets to our pages in all kinds of ways, including the semi-serendipitous sharing. All of this, while interesting, might be just prologue.  News aggregation is young on Twitter or Facebook, and even on the old folks, Google and Yahoo. Very first-generation, very primitive, and done by amateurs for amateurs, largely.

So a looming question is who will emerge to lead the younger generations in bringing content together? Creating hybrid products? Weaving news onto social platforms? Socializing on a news platform? Other yet-to-be envisioned iterations?

Journalists ought to be among those who embrace these challenges – make them part of what they think about and do every day, and have their experimentation go beyond their own participation as individuals in this social sphere. We’ll learn by trying new ways of doing what we’ve done with news, by putting ourselves visibly in the social media mix, and by using the emerging tools of daily communication in all aspects of our work. It’s not enough to watch from the sidelines, or even to try to mimic what kids do”.

Edited by Melissa Ludtke, the full report is here.

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