The Wrap Up, October 9

These last 10 days has been hell for me with my wife’s sudden illness and death. But I’m trying to get back to life and get to the bottom of my feed reader even if it’s admittedly an enormous task.

Lots of stuff has been going on, and I may do this wrapping up in seperate pieces. For this one, I wan’t to touch on algorithms replacing humans, the recurring discussion around public service media and their role in society and, finally, why I think tailoring medie to fit individuals is a poor strategy.

Will algorithms make human editors obsolete?

Scott Karp is asking this question and answers it himself with a resounding ‘no’ - if editors learn to collaborate a la Digg that is.

Personally, I don’t really believe in it. I don’t believe in humans trying to mirror something that technology is already trying to do. It works the other way around, yes. But it’s a one way street.

No, the real interesting notion is for people to collaborate around a cause and pay a journalist to cover it for them. I have promoted the idea before - I called it micro-subscriptions - but I think it’s very valid nonetheless. It would be interesting to see a media company actually go out and do it.

Is this the future of public service media?

Kristine Lowe writes about public service media and how some are suggesting that public service media should serve as broad platform based media entities and outleets for all public information, ie instead of all public institutions having seperate efforts have one public service media company doing it all.

I’m torn in this. On one hand I think it could be rather efficient, and I think there’s a solid potential for really thinking it through and doing something that would be useful to people. However, on the other hand I’m all for free enterprise, and there’s just no limit to the competitive advantage of having access to the taxpayers money. Not even if you’re idea is brillant.

In other words, I think such a move could reduce the amount of innovation going on, because the incentive to do so would be removed. Hence I guess, I’m against public service media becoming all encompasing platforms.

Lisbeth Knudsen vil tjene penge på skræddersyet indhold (DK)

The head of Berlingske Officin (part of Mecom), Lisbeth Knudsen, thinks that the future revenue streams can be found in tailoring the media offering to each individual person.

I beg to differ. For several reasons. First and foremost it’s just too hard to be something to everybody and claim that you can cherry pick from your arsenal and get happy media consumers as a result. It just won’t work - the level of specialty will be too low. Second, it doesn’t address the fundamental issue about what it is that a media company should produce and which criteria it should use for doing so. Only packaging and distribution. Which at the end of the day is more or less like looking at a wound without treating it.

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