Remember the now-web (or flow web or live web…)?  That is bringing a new type of media, what J.Pulver accordingly coins as ‘now media’.

Fears are that traditional media will disappear. Not sure about that, they will end up adapting themselves (just like the mainstream public will, ie, not us -the web savvy). Traditional media’s problem is that the concept they had wrapped value around, scarcity of information and communication channels, has gone past. If they are racking their brains to move the old model to the new one, they are wrong. It’s not about what advertising amounts to. Traditional media should be trying to find a new concept to wrap value around instead. Perhaps, with the barrage of apps streaming links and content pulled and pushed by people, the concept should be around the excess of information and communication. As John Borthwick (CEO of betaworks) put it at the #140Conf, these streams are a new form of representation of data. Take Twitter for instance. It is that kind of concept that has evolved, and adapted (now it’s not about what we are doing but about what is going on. So the move is from your status to your news). Twitter is about news that matters to their users and network of friends, news as links passed on to each other. And believe us, that stream of links is sooo huge right now it’s really hard to cope with (ask our dev team).

Another concept where to wrap your value (talking to you, media-related people) is relevance and trustworthiness. Ryan Osborn -Today Show producer- says that “it’s happening so fast we’re forgetting to check if it’s right” (”Twitter as a News Gathering Tool” panel at #140conf). There you go, boy. Relevance is a very subjective term, what it’s relevance for you, even coming from the Today Show, might not be relevant for me. So you guys rather stop exerting parental control on that and we are not so dumb, as a matter of fact (and this would make Darwin happy) current bombard of information and communication is probably making us smarter (remember Steven Johnson’s Sleeper Curve theory?). As @AnnCurry (Today Show’s news anchor) put it at that panel “judgment is not taught in school, it’s gained over time”. Let users decide on relevance through apps that give popularity ranks based upon on weighted algorithms. Do you have weighted algorythms in your impartial newspapers? Focus on trustworthiness, instead. It’s part of your job.

So rack your brains on that, ie. new environments to wrap up: the excess of information and the aspect of trustworthiness. Om Malik, from GigaOm, calls it “a desperate need for context“.

[In any case, call me romantic, I thought journalism's main motto was about breaking news and reaching to people and places far beyond. But that was a lie, with the crisis the truth uncovers: Nah, it's the money, stupid!]

*Recommended: Watch the 33 sessions from #140conf here.
*Bronwen Clune (@bronwen, CEO of Norg Media) claims that Twitter is chaos theory in action. I like to think we are coding something to make information out of it.

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