A Look Back at 2003, and What's on the Horizon for the Online News Universe

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But 2003 offered up much more than just an unhealthy fascination with blogs.
We also obsessed over the proliferation of people with camera phones
breaking spot news stories; the rise of Google and Google News; the soap
opera at (AOL) Time Warner; the continued inroads of paid content; RSS
feeds; massive online coverage of the war in Iraq; viruses, worms and spam
overwhelming newsrooms; the struggle for independent news in Zimbabwe,
China, Iran and Iraq; and political rhetoric and election coverage.

What do you think will be the most important developments in online
journalism in the coming year?
A continued explosion in blogging:
"Some mainstream news organization will likely find a way to bring a 'rock
star' blogger into the organization or somehow find a way to embrace the
most powerful of the new journalistic voices emerging on the Web. This will
be part of a longstanding pattern, where news organizations bring the best
of the Web into their operations." -- Lee Rainie

"Improved quality of commentary via journalists' personal blogs, unfiltered
by media owners. More people relying on Net for news." -- Craig Newmark

"Increasing growth of the blogosphere beyond the English speakers to
Chinese, Portugese, Spanish, Arabic, and European languages. The first
blogger/president of the world (Howard Dean), I guess! Members of
parliaments around the world finding Weblogs to be the best tool to
communicate with their people. Also they'll be popular among teachers,
professors, and their assistants to get in touch with students." -- Hossein
Derakhshan

Net influences politics:
"The political campaign will focus new attention on the Internet as a
communications medium and this will build a new audience for online
journalism. I predict at least one major news organization and/or pundit
will write in late winter (just after the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire
primary) that this is the year the Internet has come into its own the way TV
emerged as the dominant political communications medium in 1960. This won't
be true, but it will be treated as a milestone for the Internet -- and
online journalism." -- Lee Rainie
"Online journalism will play a bigger role than ever in telling the story of
the 2004 election, perhaps the most important in three decades. Today's
political campaign demands more than linear storytelling, and online
journalists are best equipped to tell those stories." -- Dean Wright

Participatory journalism:
"I think more and more non-journalists will commit, as JD Lasica puts it,
'random acts of journalism.' Weblogs and picture phones have whetted the
content-generation appetites of a whole generation of amateur reporters. I
suspect news companies eventually will realize the appeal of
non-journalists' content -- it's more interesting because it's more real --
and unsuccessfully attempt to get in on the action. Then, if amateur
journalism really catches on, it's inevitable that news companies will try
to reinvent themselves as 'the information providers you've always trusted.'
Such a fundamental shift in thinking probably couldn't happen in only a
year, but I think we're already ankle-deep into this chain of events." --
Adrian Holovaty, lead developer for the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World Web
site

"Photo phones bringing amateur video journalism to mainstream audiences.Puts
power in the people's hands, and the demand for 'real life' video (e.g.
'Cops' and its spawn) is heavy." -- Alan Abbey

"Photo phones are going to have a major impact on journalism in the coming
years. It's the whole idea of citizens having in their pockets -- at all
times -- the power to document some news event that they find themselves
part of and instantly post it to the Internet. I hear a lot of people in the
industry yawn when I and others enthuse about photo phones, but they're
missing something profound. I predict that in the next couple years, we're
going to see more amateur citizen photojournalism showing up in all forms of
news media -- from ordinary people carrying photo phones who find themselves
in extraordinary circumstances, with no journalists in sight. And we'll see
more photo-phone-carrying reporters turned into impromptu photographers when
their photojournalist colleagues aren't on the scene." -- Steve Outing,
senior editor at Poynter, and columnist for Editor & Publisher

"I'm going to continue to sing one note: We will continue to witness an
explosion of citizens' media into more countries and down to a hyperlocal
level and into more kinds of content: audio, video, social networks...More
and more big media will try blogging -- though what they should do first is
listen to what their audiences are saying in this new form. We will see
successful journalists and businesses launched from the world of citizens'
media." -- Jeff Jarvis

Real Simple Syndication feeds:
"RSS. I think the uptake of news readers and RSS feeds is quite important.
It'll break out mainstream in 2004. Finally push that works." -- John
Battelle, visiting professor, Graduate School of Journalism, University of
California-Berkeley

"The maturation and increased visibility of RSS as an alternative to a
plagued e-mail publishing environment. This is still in its infancy, but RSS
should evolve into an e-publishing technology that eventually is on a par
with e-mail and the Web. It's still got plenty of rough edges, but once
Microsoft builds it into Internet Explorer it should become mainstream." --
Steve Outing

Better content -- at a price:
"2004 will be the year of better, richer, deeper content -- for a price.
Online publications wrestling with their bottom lines spent 2003 embracing
the paid content model. In 2004, they'll realize that the content needs to
be damn good if people are going to shell out, so we should start to see
improvements (better interactivity, more Web-exclusive journalism, a more
intelligent approach to personalization, etc.)." -- Angus Frame
"Fairly substantial profits at a number of newspaper sites that have been
just barely in the black or slightly red for the past couple of years. Plus,
a power grab going on right now on both the editorial and business sides. On
editorial side, the print side of newspapers are seeing that online is an
increasingly important part of their readership. This isn't necessarily a
bad thing. It likely means greater attention paid, more resources -- so long
as they keep their eye on the ball and continue to embrace innovation." --
Peter Krasilovsky

"The single most important development will be the recognition by
advertising agencies that online journalism can be a major profit center.
All these agencies are facing the same crisis in broadcasting. The question
is, 'Where did the audience go?' Instead of being able to command millions
of dollars in fees from a monopoly of air waves of three or four major
networks, the audience has been splintered into hundreds of cable and
satellite operators. By the time you add in the Web, you are talking about
an infinite number of content suppliers.... The answers may be to aggregate
Web sites. At that point, the value of Web sites quickly will raise from
hundreds of dollars per year to millions."  -- Dirck Halstead

Watch out, Google:
"I do predict that 2004 will be the year that Google gets greedy, and a
significant group of odd bedfellows will band together to challenge Google's
hegemony." -- Travis Smith, editor of Variety.com

Same as it ever was:
"I don't expect anything important to happen in online journalism during
2004. Though there might be modestly incremental increases in the amount of
original reporting done online, most news sites will simply continue to
shovel their print or broadcast editions' contents online, plus attempt to
transplant their traditional media's business models online. Unfortunately,
not a lot of that shoveling or transplantation makes sense. Declining media
put online does not ascending media make." -- Vin Crosbie

Full text:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1071797940.php