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SXSW: Future of News Brightens

We started our day here at SXSW attending a panel in support of our colleague Tim Ruder, entitled “Imagineering the Fully Digitized and Connected Future.”

Organizer Dan Willis had presenters each take two hours of a single day in 2015. Speakers then described their future vision in narrative form with supporting pictures. The presenters had no idea what anyone was going to say in advance, and neither did we. The result was a surprisingly cohesive view of the future, with each presenter offering their own cluster of provocative ideas about how the future would play out. A video and deck will be available and once it is we’ll update this post to include it.

Tim’s presentation centered on how a device, which he called a “looking glass” – a kind of transparent, hand-held smart phone — might change the way we interact with our environment. You can pick up your looking glass and look through it to view an data enhanced landscape. Information related to one’s surroundings is overlaid based on what you’re looking at through the device.

The general concept of augmented reality was anticipated by Ivan Sutherland, a computer scientist widely considered the creator of Computer Graphics, in a 1966 paper, but the transparent tablet format was an interesting (and maybe not so far off) twist on cumbersome reality-augmenting goggles, and Tim’s thinking about the educational and social implications was quite thought-provoking.

From here, we attended “Online News of Tomorrow.” Yet again, we encountered some tiresome Web 2.0 rallying cries: ‘crowd sourcing versus professional journalism,’ and ‘bottoms up versus top down editorial models.’ While we think there is definitely something productive about this discussion, we need more creative intersections. An example is Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock. Sloganized as “a news feed for your block,” Holovaty’s site is aggregating hard public records data AND user generated content and surfacing them in easy-to-use interfaces in local neighborhoods.

The panelists we appreciated the most pointed out how it is not an either/or situation and that there is a middle ground. Jeff Jarvis suggested that it is important for news organizations to reconsider the role of the storyteller. Instead, he encouraged thinking around enabling information and adding value around content curation, vetting and promotion.

As the panel was winding down, the idea of surfacing publications’ “sugar” over “vegetables” in search and social channels cropped up. What if nobody searches for the vegetables? Meaning the long enterprise pieces on foreign affairs, as in Taliban insurgencies in Afghanistan. Those answers are still emerging.

We still do have to find a way to address big issues like accountability, accuracy, and civic responsibility, in media, instead of assuming truth will simply emerge from the crowd. It’s silly to think the crowd — much less the engines — won’t miss something really important. There is a big difference between “trending” and “important” and there are reasons why we have a representative democracy instead of a direct one.

We had lunch with Jay Rosen at Austin’s Flip Happy Crepes. It was a refreshing escape from the SXSW lunch lines. We have to say we were enthralled with Jay’s take on media evolution and the anthropology of the newsroom — not to mention the crowd here at SXSW.  Jay has been anticipating issues with how the fourth estate relates to the community since the early nineties.  It was a joy to be able to discuss some of these important issues with him.

We’re looking forward to the rest of the festival and meeting more of you.

— Jay (@jaybudzik) and Sheigh (@sheigh)

iPhotos by @sheigh

Tags: search, journalism, social, sxsw, ugc, jeff jarvis, crowd sourcing, augmented reality, adrian holovaty, dan willis, tim ruder, jay rosen, ivan sutherland,