There’s an interesting discussion on Publishing 2.0 about how the new internet bubble will be brought about by the proliferation of community-created media, because the sheer volume of generated content will undermine the economics of the industry.
The reason why this is interesting is because sites like CommonTimes.org and NewsVine.com are at the forefront of this supposed bubble, and the speed of adoption is such that the traditional media industry isn’t being outnumbered so much as absorbed. Jason Kottke mentioned that blogs in particular are going to be difficult to differentiate from traditional media. He makes the example of sites from Weblogs Inc or Gawker Media, which are blurring the lines between traditional and non-traditional journalism as their readerbase grows.
I think that over the next few years that line will continue to blur, until it will be near-impossible to tell the difference between the two. Consider how an average newswire works: when a story breaks, typically it is shot off to an offshore (probably Indian) journalist to write up the news flash and send that on down the wire to the various agencies subscribed to the service. A more experienced journalist then goes over the story details and writes a lengthier, more in-depth piece based on the facts from the flash. (You can read more about this and other outsourcing initiatives on Thomas Friedman’s "The World is Flat.")
The interesting thing about this process is that there’s very little difference between that, and what you would normally see on NewsVine or CommonTimes. (You could actually combine the up-to-the-second urgency of Digg and the reportage functionality of NewsVine and come up with a very similar workflow, depending on the subject matter.) The key difference here is the people who are writing the analyses, but even there, I think, we are starting to see a lot of overlap. Professional journalists are, after all, simply people with degrees and connections. If they’re very good, they’ll also have reputations to protect, and if they’re really, really good, they’ll have opinions that people will ascribe to and other journalists will be influenced by. Essentially: it’s exactly what happens online, every day. If I read about Cory Doctorow lambasting red-tailed sportive lemurs, for example, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a decent winning trait for that species as well.
The point I’m trying to make here is that non-traditional reportage mimics its traditional "evil twin" in so many ways that the only real difference is the number of active voices. (I suppose you could also argue that traditional media has fewer entrypoints and a higher standard of quality, but the popularity-driven nature of the collaborative web has many of the same effects, where weaker work is largely ignored and links picked up by "leaders" experience tremendous, server-shaking surges in visitors.)
That "number of active voices" though, is key, because it lengthens an already long tail to the point of oversaturation. That oversaturation won’t just come from third-party outlets either; after all, what’s to stop the New York Times or CNN or any other established news agency from making their own in-house CommonTimes, with reportage from their readers? If they’re worried about being outdated by non-traditionals, then coming up with their own (enforceable) brand of citizen-journalism would seem to be the best way to make sure their market share is maintained.
What conclusions can we come up with from all this? To be totally honest, I don’t know. I do know that the bubble is starting emerge, and it is firmly rooted in media and the methods we’ve developed to generate it. I also know that people will not stop using these methods anytime soon, and it will create a major dissonance in how people can expect to make money from content. It may mean that traditional news agencies will have to start tightening up, in much the same way as the music industry has clammed up against the tide of piracy, et al. As more collaborative news sites pop up, I can imagine the market divvying itself up in to progressively smaller slices and smaller audiences.
I wanted to end this piece with a big finish, but decided to end with a hypothetical question instead: how many journalists do you think 1.06 billion internet users actually need?
[ NOTE: This article was originally published at http://gutter.newsvine.com. Newsvine is currently in an invitation-only beta, so I thought I'd post it here as well. ]