Recently, there’s been quite a spate of articles proclaiming the death of news as we know it. Newspapers are teetering on the edge of financial insolvency, shedding staff like bad dandruff, and bemoaning the popularity of aggregation sites like The Huffington Post (or, for example, our own site). A number of suggestions have been floated to solve the problem, mostly involving making people pay for the news access that they currently get for free on the web.  But will this alone be enough?

The Google and Amazon Revolutions have been about making computers intelligent—that is, so they don’t treat everyone the same way.  The world’s best mathematicians and artificial intelligence researchers have been working around the clock on letting computers remember who the user is and what the user likes.  The information collected is then applied to try to predict what kind of things the user would like, based on past preferences.  The wide availability of email now means that we don’t even have to open a web browser in order to find all the information we want.  On Amazon or Netflix I’ve gotten plenty of very helpful recommendations; Google smart advertisements allow me to find what I need without even having to look for it.  The Blogosphere can tell me what the news actually means without my having to read it.  It’s the ultimate in cheap, easy information.

What does this mean for the news?  It means a complete revolution is necessary.  The old paradigm is well on its way to the grave.  Given the saturation of personalized information, broad-spectrum advertising no longer has as big an effect.  We don’t need to scan through a hundred ads when a quick search of our email contains all the information we’re looking for.  Both online and in print, advertisements are becoming a thing of the past—or at the very least, more expensive than they’re really worth, and definitely not enough to sustain large news organizations.  So how can we bring the lessons of the internet to journalism?

Central News Searchable Database
Why doesn’t the mainstream news take some pointers from the scientific world?  Peer-reviewed journal articles typically can’t be viewed for free by the ordinary citizen.  Instead, universities and organizations pay for subscriptions that allow users to search and download articles.  Recent articles typically required full subscription, whereas older articles could often be found for free—exactly the opposite of what The New York Times and The Washington Post do.

When I worked in a research lab, I used a wonderful tool called ScienceDirect.  It was a powerful search engine that remembered your past results and would recommend other articles (based on citations, in true scientific fashion).  Newspapers should combine their archives under a universal search engine that is available only to paid subscribers.  They should make it a powerful and customizable search engine to allow users to greatly refine their searches.  It should also contain various algorithms to predict articles of interest based on past preferences—certain columnists or articles containing multiple references to “China”, for example.  Currently, most of them only have user-selected preferences.  With all due respect to the users, they are often terrible at recognizing their own true biases.

People prefer to have a context to put things in.  Instead of publishing every day, many newspapers may have to convert themselves (in print fashion, at least) to a weekly newspaper. This will obviously save a great deal in terms of staff cost, and possibly improve the quality of articles (though certainly reduce the quantity).  The focus of news, like we’ve seen in television journalism, will change from simple reporting of the facts and events to interpretation of facts and events.  Articles will continue to be published in a more haphazard manner online, and the weekly print edition will contain the highlights of what’s been popular online, along with meta-reviews of the news.

Whatever the fix, action should be taken soon.  If there’s something that the financial crisis has taught us is that just because a company is a fixture doesn’t mean that its future is assured.  The New York Times and The Washington Post are just as vulnerable to collapse as any Wall Street company.  Gentlemen, it’s time to recognize that you have a quality product, and that the literate masses need to truly appreciate it.  And who appreciates something that’s totally free?