Facebook + Content = Newspaper?

170 million users can’t be wrong…

The New York Times has about 1 million readers every day.

Facebook has 170 million users.

This tells you something.

The NY Times, (and NBC and The SF Chronicle) were all created in a time of linear distribution.

That is – we print the paper (or make the TV show), you watch it.

Active creators, passive observers.

It’s a model that fit the technology of complex and expensive one-way transmisison – printing presses, transmission towers, cable and so on.

Now along comes the web, which by its very architecture goes both ways – in fact it goes lots of ways at the same time.  Creator and consumer are on the same page – and can do both, all the time.

Old media companies have tried, and failed, to plug the old model into the new technology. Take The NY Times. Go to their website and what do you see? A newspaper online.

Quaint.

But look at a website that is alive, humming, vibrant and growing – look at Facebook. In only a very few years, it has grown to 170 million users and it’s just getting started. Something in here works.

What works is that the architecture of Facebook, that is, the way it works, matches what the web does – connect like minded individuals to like minded individuals – all the time. It keeps them informed.

Of course, what it keeps them informed about is sheer trivia.  “Went to the park today”.  “Can believe I ordered the Osso Bucco here in Vegas”.

It is news, but of a rather banal stripe.

But suppose, just suppose, that we created an online machine that worked like Facebook, but was filled with more significant (?) content – ie, information and opinion about Iraq or the economy or Bernie Madoff?

Suppose it was an ongoing dialogue, no, make that multilogue, about events around the world – continually seeded by those who actually knew something about what was happening and why.

THIS would be a NEWSPAPER… but a newspaper for the digital era.

And one that, I think, would work.

Text, stills, video, blogs, opinion, information, feedback – an endless global conversation amongst those who are interested – both passive and active.

Could work.

So as old newspapers such as The Rocky Mountain News or the Seattle PI try to reconstruct themselves online, there is a moment of opportunity to invent something new, as opposed to try and drive a dead tree once more.