The Future of News and Information
You may stick CNN on line as CNN+, but it will fail.
King Solomon, the Bible tells us, was a wise man. He had memorized 5,000 proverbs.
That probably did not make Solomon. the kind of guy you wanted to have dinner with, but in those days, the ability to memorize was equated with intelligence. That’s because there was no other way to store knowledge or to pass it on to others.
For most of human history, we have shared information by remembering and telling stories, often generation after generation. The Odyssey and the Iliad by Homer were both oral stories long before they were codified in writing.
This oral tradition held strong until 1450, when the invention of the printing press made it possible not just to record things in writing but to share them with millions of people. Prior to Gutenberg and his printing press, the largest library in the world was at Cambridge University. It held 40 books.
Gutenberg took us from the world of oral tradition to the written word, and that has remained an incredibly powerful tool. Our notion of reality is still cast in the idea of ‘seeing it in print’, or ‘write that down.’
But even when new technologies come along there is a lead time between when they first appear and when they can begin to shift how we tell stories and pass information to each other. Even though the printing press was invented in 1450, the first novel, Robinson Crusoe did not appear until 1719, nearly 300 years later. Why was that?
When Gutenberg printed his first bible in 1450, he could just as easily have printed The New York Times the next day. All the technology for it was there. What was lacking was the idea of a newspaper. That would take another 300 years as well.
The Internet first appeared in 1969. The first email would not be sent until 1971 and Google would not be created until 1998. Even today, things take time. The technology appears but it takes time to understand how to use it; to invent new formats.
In 2001, Kodak launched its online photo sharing site — Kodak Easy Share Gallery. For more than 100 years, Kodak had pretty much owned the photography business. Kodak meant photography. And Kodak certainly was aware of the web. That was why they launched Kodak Easy Share. They should have owned that space as well.
Instagram, who would ultimately own the online photo world, was not launched until 2010, giving Kodak a full decade to build their online presence. But they could not bring themselves to do it. It was antithetical to the world they had always know of film and print.
Today, Instagram has a net worth of $100 billion. Kodak has a net worth of $600,000.
Even if you take an old and very successful business model and stick it on the web, it generally will not work. It is simply too far removed from what they have already known.
Now we come to the world of news and information. You may stick CNN on line as CNN+, but it will fail. It will fail because the DNA of CNN (and NBC and ABC and Fox) are in expensive linear broadcasting. We make it, you watch it.
But suppose we were to re-imagine news and information from a purely web design — like eBay or Airbnb or Instagram or TikTok. Not a few highly paid ‘reporters’, but millions of people contributing content all the time. A pure web play.
What would it look like?
It would look a lot like UnPress.