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Comment by btipling | Hacker News Reader

News is ripe for disruption. News was a better business when it was harder to find out what was happening in the world because of difficulty in transporting information and media. That's all gone now.

Has Buffet heard of Twitter?

News aggregators like Huffington Post?

The only thing I think news papers have over citizen journalists is credibility, editorial and writing quality. Decent news analysis can be derived from prominent bloggers.

I wouldn't want to be in the business of any kind of content creation in the long term. Copyright as a concept is going to be fundamentally challenged in the next few generations.

Newspapers are just whistling past the graveyard right now.

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This is an interesting perspective. The logical conclusion of this perspective is that the people who currently are paid to be reporters, editors, writers, photographers, etc. add little to no value to the world. Similarly, that news can exist without primary sources to exchange on Twitter of for bloggers to write about.

As a counterpoint, I'd suggest that:

1) Most people are not able to obsessively follow everyone on Twitter, and filter through the tweets for the most relevant news. For the first job of a news organ is to filter out the noise.

2) News aggregators must aggregate something. Take the homepage of HuffPo, for instance. Most of the articles posted there are written by people on the HuffPo payroll. Most of the others link to sites where someone was paid to write the article, like the Washington Post. None are direct links to a tweet.

3) Credibility is not an afterthought for most people. We expect our news outlets to at least make an attempt to be credible and/or publicize their biases.

4) Prominent bloggers don't typically interview local officials. Local officials matter, but they are not sexy and often must be visited in person for interviews. The general point here is that very few people will cover some important parts of the news for free, because doing it sucks.

"The logical conclusion of this perspective is that the people who currently are paid to be reporters, editors, writers, photographers, etc. add little to no value to the world."

They do add value - the problem is they aren't getting the revenue generated by their work. It's being siphoned off by the cut/paste/add some commentary aggregators. "Old" news will continue to exist, but with smaller budgets and less resources to do "real" reporting.

To the typical reader or viewer, credibility is equivalent to agreeing with ones own biases while claiming to be unbiased. Hence the state of journalism.

Exactly - Republicans watch Fox, Democrats watch MSNBC & everyone is happy hearing what they already believe.

People read news to find out what's happening. That's mostly it. If they can find out what's happening without paying for it, they will, even if their source isn't written by a published Harvard graduate who has years of experience and writes like a god.

When I look at newspapers, there's a lot of stuff in there that is badly written, and there's a whole lot about stuff that doesn't need "proper" journalists: celebrity gossip, how to lose weight, move reviews, etc. Much of this can be offloaded by Twitter, blogs, tumblr, whatever.

Then we're left with all the rest, which might actually be interesting news and articles. There's probably too many reporters for this, though, if we exclude everything else.

I think I'm going somewhere with this...

Not just credibility. There are multiple kinds of journalism. There's observe something and report it....

... but there's also long, hard, investigative journalism which means tracking multiple complex stories for sometimes years, issuing freedom of information requests, developing contacts in key places etc.

Admittedly journalists have become weaker watchdogs than ever before, perhaps because the media business has made it difficult to tell real hard stories from random shock-value crap by giving everything a shock value edge to keep selling... And perhaps this is what needs to be fixed.

Has Buffet heard of Twitter?

Seriously? The guy is a genius. I'm guessing 'yes'.

The only thing I think news papers have over citizen journalists is credibility, editorial and writing quality.

Is that all? Sounds like if you can convince people those things are valuable, they might be willing to pay for it.

I wouldn't want to be in the business of any kind of content creation in the long term.

If by 'content creation' you mean content shoveling, then yes, I agree. But I'm bullish on synthesizing streams of data into cohesive narratives.

'The only thing I think news papers have over citizen journalists is credibility, editorial and writing quality'

Those are pretty big competitive advantages. In fact, I'd say those are the three main factors people use when choosing where to get their news from.

You're probably right, but I think the future that you describe is less certain than it seems. For all the abundance and redundance of news and news outlets we underestimate the bottlenecks in the system.

If you trace the actual information items back to the source, you'll find that there aren't that many sources and there's a limited number of people who get the information from the original source and do some basic checks in terms of corroboration.

If the organisations that work the sources stop giving that information away for free and manage to reduce or slow down copying just a tiny bit, they have tremendous leverage. The general news business could look a little bit more like the financial news business.

There are two kind of journalism, opinion and report, while it's true everyone is able to give its opinion, reporting facts is a fulltime job. I worked in a newspaper and most people don't get how much work it takes to produces a 2500 characters story.

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